Geo 730: September 5, Day 613: You're So Vein

Of the last three times I've been to Quartzville, twice with Hollie Oakes-Miller and husband Gary, once with Dana and Aaron, this was the only trip on which I had the energy to haul myself up this dratted hill. Then I got to this point, and realized I was so exhausted that it would be unwise and unsafe to tire myself any further: I still had to get back down. Hopefully, I'll do the trip backwards at some point, so this is an early stop, and I'm still pretty fresh. It certainly deserves more time than I've given it recently.

We're looking at the vein from nearly end-on in this shot. It's not easy to judge the scale of the photo, but that wall is maybe 3 meters/10 feet thick and about 12 meters/40 feet tall. The quartz crystals aren't massive and pure, like, for example, one sees in the Hot Springs, Arkansas, area. Nevertheless, as we'll see in coming days, there are some very pretty crystals to be found here. The impurities- mostly iron and manganese- often give them some awfully nice earth tones. And the weathering of the vein has broken some of the rocks into a manageable size. With the larger blocks, it's futile trying to break them with any size hammer. They're just too tough.

Photo unaltered. August 5, 2012. FlashEarth Location.