 Hello and welcome again to the rugged rockhound. Today I'm once again joined with Eric. We're out here north of Grand Junction looking for the famed barite crystals that occur in the concretions out here. So this is not the main area. The main area is over that way. So we're just over here off the side of the road. We're going to explore this area. You can see the remnants of some of the nodules or concretions that tend to hold the barite and calcite. So most of the time you'll find calcite. Sometimes you find barite. So what you're trying to do is find that barite. So uh wish us luck. Oh and here's the GPS port GPS coordinates like always to where we parked. All right let's go see if we can find something. Okay so we're right here on the side of the road. I had spotted what looked like a good possible spot and I was like we should check that first. We've been here just a few minutes. I just started scratching the surface here but Eric already found. Look at that. It's a pocket. It's got some crystals in it. Looks like calcite maybe barite. Here let me go ahead and put the uh macro lens on and give you a better look in there. All right got the macro lens on. Look at that in there. Isn't that beautiful? Look at those crystals. I think it's mostly calcite. That might be a barite. We'll see it better once we uh find the get it out. So Eric's been pulling out some calcites here. Some nice uh pieces of calcite but he just pulled this out of the bottom of the pocket. It was just sitting there and pulling. It's the tip of a barite crystal. Very beautiful. It's water clear. Look at that. Kind of like a topaz almost. Looks a lot like a topaz. But look at that. That is a beautiful barite crystal. Nice job. So Eric started pulling some out. Look at that. Nice terminated barite and some other little pieces and moved the things up here that we're not so sure of. However I'm pretty sure now that's that's a broken one. I don't know when they're broken it can be kind of hard. Just got to feel the weight. Maybe that'll help. Really cool though. I started digging in my own area while I've been digging in it and what you're trying to do is find this rust color. That's what Eric's telling me is that you're looking for this rust color and you want to follow it and usually there'll be veins of calcite which you're seeing here. These veins of calcite have been pulling out some larger chunks like this. So this one's a really good one though. He's exposed a little more. So the crystal on top unfortunately ended up being really fractured. It came out in pieces but you can see a nice good vein of calcite right there. So he's going to be following that backward hoping to find some good barite crystals. So he just pulled out the piece that had the the end of the barite in it so you can see how fractured it was naturally already in the pocket and it just came out in pieces. Too bad but I don't know maybe you can piece it back together right. But maybe as you go deeper in there maybe you'll find some barites that are intact. Right. Well you already got some small ones that are completely intact that are beautiful. Yeah. I've been digging for a while. Eric went off elsewhere to try and look for more stuff. This is his actual hole. I wasn't finding much over there so I've continued. He pretty much cleaned it out. There wasn't much left but this area looks like it was going down this way after digging for a while. But then I found a vein right here and look what came out of that vein for me. Look at that nice barite crystal. Beautiful. Yeah I hope to find more like that. So yeah there was a whole bunch of calcite and I'll dig through that to see if there's any more barite. It's probably some small ones. I mean eventually I'm going to take the screen and screen all of this. Make sure we didn't miss any. But yeah where I'm trying to get is down in here. I think it's going to continue that way. And the vein kind of goes like that. As you may have noticed things look a little different. I decided to give this a shot. I'm going to try and film in kind of a studio environment where I've set up everything inside, made the lighting hopefully in a way that we'll be able to see the cool specimens and everything better. So we're going to give that a shot. So here's this crystal all cleaned off. This one turned out beautiful. And not a crack in it which is apparently a pretty difficult thing to do. So as it turns out this barite is very susceptible to cracking from temperature change. And so if you're not careful, if you pull it out of the cold damp earth and put it into the hot sun it can crack on you. And when you get it home if you wash it in water that's too warm or too cold it can also crack on you. So yeah I'm glad that I was careful with this one and managed to keep it from cracking. Here's this broken piece of calcite. Just thought I'd show you how clear they can be. And I bet there are ones that are even clear. Here's this neat little crystal of calcite all cleaned off. Quite clear. So I've been chasing a vein of calcite and just been pulling it all out. But then I got this big rock out of here and looked behind it. Nice. Some good potential in there. Looks like I might have a nice crystal here, probably calcite, but who knows there could be some barite down in there somewhere. Exciting. Here's this little crystal all cleaned up. Also very nice looking. Here's this specimen all cleaned off. It's got that nice crystal right there on that edge. And then some bigger ones here that are broken and didn't terminate. And then you got another little one over here on the side which did break a little bit. Here's this little cluster all cleaned off. It's again a bunch of like crystals that either broke or didn't finish terminating. Still cool. This is a neat little one that had that little clear crystal right there. Cool. Here's this calcite crystal all cleaned off. Except for here. This is going to take a little bit more work to actually clean that off. Very nice. So I'm taking a break from digging. Your arms need to break every now and then. And I'm just kind of walking around and searching. Thought I'd bring you guys in and just kind of show you what it looks like out here. So we were digging over on a road cut there, parked down there. And so yeah, we're just kind of out here taking a look around. You can see where people have dug into these nodules over the years. And you'll see tons of calcite all over the place. Most likely aren't going to see much barite because that's what they would have kept. But after all that precipitation, who knows. If you just wander around here, look on the surface, you might find some barites. So that's what I'm going to do now. Just kind of kind of wander the surface. See if I see any like edge of a new concretion that's being exposed. Or if I just find any barites laying around. When I spotted this over from the other side of the fence, I'm like, Oh, look, somebody been digging in there. And then I looked up here and I was like, well, there's more of it, but it doesn't really look like it's been dug through. So I was like, okay, do I see calcite coming out anywhere? And I was just looking around and then I came out here and I was like, well, there's tons coming out there. It looks like somebody kind of scraped it, but didn't really dig it. And then as I got close, look at that a barite crystal just sitting on the surface right here. So I think I'm going to dig into this. Here's this one cleaned off. Definitely better if you can find them underground. This one being on the surface, it's all frosted now. I'm surprised though that it didn't get cracked from the sun. I guess some of them are a little stronger than others. Well, after digging a little bit, it looks like it mostly was stuff that had been worked down from that. And it just kind of looked like there wasn't a hole, but it probably used to be here and then worked down there. So I'm going to continue walking around and just look for things on the surface. So I was over there, just found another barite crystal on the surface. Unfortunately, this one's a bit fractured, not the prettiest, but decent size. I'm going to look around here some more. We've walked quite a ways from where we were. Found this old one. I was digging on the side and I found some cool bladed calcite crystals that are really dirty. So I'll have to try and wash them off. Maybe I'll have to treat them with something. But they look kind of cool, so we'll take them back and wash them off. Here's this calcite crystal cleaned off. Here's this calcite crystal cleaned off. It's got a few fractures going through it. Oh well. Here's this calcite crystal cleaned off. Here's this calcite crystal cleaned off, or partially anyway, what I could clean off. Here's this barite crystal all cleaned off. I thought it was fractured. This would have been really cool if it had been complete and not damaged. Still nice. And then I found this. I'm pretty darn sure this is barite. Yeah, it's barite. It's some barite that's just kind of barely on the rock that they left behind. And I think that's pretty cool. I'm going to take that. Here's this big crystal cleaned off. As you can see, broken here. But this was just out sitting on the surface. Somebody else had dug the side of the ground and left it. I just thought it was really cool. I thought it was worth keeping. So, yeah. I've learned that this darker color is evidence of barite. It is barite. The calcite usually is more colorless. Still cool. And we're back at the vehicle. Let's get windy out here. But that was great. We found quite a few barites and some nice stuff. Not bad for the first time out here. Learned a lot. I've got a better feel for how and where to look. So, I really hope you enjoyed this one. I sure did. And I look forward to coming out here more often and see what else I can find. Until next time, remember, there is treasure everywhere.