Ive been invited to staff at shadowcliff, a lodge/hostel/conference center on the edge of rocky mountain National Park, and agreed to start on the 12th!The lodge is located above the village of Grand Lake, CO, and is a 12-hour drive from KC (if you go the speed limit)- however, I couldn't let an opportunity pass, and decided to take advantage of the drive by cutting south- to an area I'd not yet seen... Colorado springs..
The drive was extraordinarily wet- it rained non-stop from Topeka through salina. There was a nice spot of sun near colby and rain again after I passed Limon, CO.
Ive read about the area for years.. it's famous gold mines, high peaks, rock garden and world-class ROCKHOUNDING! I mapped out a rough itinerary and hit the road on Saturday morning.
.....A few tanks of gas later, around 3:30, I reached my first destination; Lake George, co. Lake George is a small town about 40 miles west of Colorado springs, and is really not important except as a landmark. My area, Spruce grove, lies about 16 miles nnw of town. Spruce grove is a national forest campground- known for it's great topaz field. I knew nothing of the campground, except that it had a creek and a topaz-crystal hunting area.
Immediately after I arrived and claimed my camp site (wasn't easy- the area was packed), I ran into STEVE. Steve is the campground host and is probably the most friendly person Ive ever met! he told me all about the area- the fishing and hiking along tarryall creek, panning for gold, and of course, the topaz. "Go over the walkin' bridge and hang an immediate left. Follow that path along the crick 'til you pass the chain-link fence behind the private property you see over there... take a right after you pass the fence and follow it past two pine trees layin' across the trail, over a hill, trough an aspen grove for 'bout 3/4 mile. When ya' get to he meadow, look to the far end. If you look real' carefully, you'l see a fallen pine. A great big'on.. Just behind that dead pine you'll find yerself a pair of livin' pines with real faint white markin's... REAL faint white paint on the trees... ya gotta look real' carefully or else you'l miss it.
... you gotta cross the meadow- just below those three peaks (he pointed)... and go through those two pines with the REAL faint white markin's..... From there its only 'bout 200 yrds, but its REAL steep... you'll see all sort of holes where people ben' diggin... not too many folks know about it..."
SO, I did just that. .. and even found the Topaz claim! ... and got stuck in a lightning storm. I 
crawled under an elephant- sized boulder to dig out of the rain., The dirt was a light brown/orange, with lots of granite, and a few good hunks of milky quartz. I dug and dug- 'imagined what would happen if I took a handful too-much dirt and the boulder gave... or by how much the crow-bar beside me would increase my chance of getting struck by the continuous, loud lightning..Right about the time the rain stopped, my day-dreams were interrupted by a crystal-shaped something that emerged from the pile of dirt I removed from the boulder that was to squish me.
I cleaned the something off and discovered a very clear point.. It was about the size of a nickle.
The point is shaped like many quartz points I have found- fattened, but with many facets, though it lacks the horizontal 'saw-marks that a quartz would have. I am still not sure WHAT it is - other than dirty and a little beat-up, but it is pretty!When the threatening clouds became thick again, I retreated to the campsite- over the mine, down the 'real-steep' hill, through the 'real-faint' white trees, across the meadow, over the hill and through the woods,....
.....I met Steve at the bottom. He shared stories of crystals he and others had found on the hill.. including a huge, double-terminated blue topaz that sold for $40000. He went on about the weather- about how unusual it was to get clouds that late in the day- and asked if I had tried my luck with a gold pan yet. His curiosity prompted me to pick up my pan and jump in the creek. I was already very wet from the rain- the creek was cold, but didn't seem too wet...
It was becoming dark, fast and I drained the heaviest contents of about a dozen pans of material from the stream bed into a plastic bag.
I woke the following morning, Sunday morning, to an unexpectedly COLD tent. I could see my breathe, and though I was able to take pleasure in the august experience, I had to get out of my sleeping bag sometime.! The sky had only just begun to display that mystical pre-dawn blue when I was adding layers upon layers of clothing to my t-shirt/jeans. I walked up and down the surrounding countryside until the summit of the steep granite hill near the camp was lit by the overwhelming sunlight. I was the only conscious thing for several hours, and the valley that held our camp was almost too quiet. There was an occasional bird or bark, but no wind, no generators, tvs or radios, and none of the screaming children or drunken exclamations that I had fallen asleep to. I took a peek at the bag I had filled with heavy sands and stones from the night before and noticed an exciting grapefruit color- I opened the bag and sorted the contents in the warm water left-over from my oatmeal breakfast. There they were !!! I had discovered garnets!!! !!! I spent the hour that it took he sunlight to reach my truck sorting out all of the larger garnets... though they were all small. Still, the hundreds of tiny, red, glass-like crystals put a buzz of excitement in me that would last for days!
I did not even notice the unusual lack of gold in the sand that had given me those gems, ... though there was a bit of black sand, a fine ore material composed of everything from iron to titanium.. often a sign of a placer deposit, aka.. PAY DIRT
I became eager to pan more in the river for those garnets, but the air around me made the water feel warm, which I knew was not, and the clouds moved in quick. I spent the morning hours digging holes in the topaz mine, enjoying the numerous wildflowers, and watching the many hummingbirds that dinned on them. .. one such bird- about the size of the happymeal superman toy I found buried at the edge of the creek- shot into the air and whistled his way to the ground.. he did it several times, and his aggressive call made me wonder if he wasn't trying to chase me off! It was not until about 2pm that I dared to go back into the creek. I filled a large prescription vial about half-way with garnets, polished quartz chips and some pretty green rock that I could not identify- before my feet and hands hit that painful-cold point.
On my way back from my mining operation, I ran into a new camper. He was a big guy- middle-aged and not in good shape. He saw my pan and asked about gold and if I had any luck.....he had a huge collection of rocks laid out on his picnic table. . Nothing that looked too special. He told me that they were knappings from an Indian hunting camp he'd discovered in the valley past Wilkerson pass- about 30 miles west of us. He had sent some of the better pieces home with a friend, but he still had some alright ones on the table. He was a local- lived on the road in the national forest, but based his operations out of his parents house in hartsel. He knew our campground like ' the back of his hand'- told me that he'd practically grown up in spruce grove- hunting for topaz with his father and two siblings. He went on to tell me about a local rarity called Amazonite- I knew of the mineral and was very excited to hear of it's whereabouts. I quizzed him down on the crystals until he finally broke down and just gave me directions. "...back to lake george and go through town until you hi a forest service road.. I think it's called 31... go up the road and hang a right on 205. It looks like you shouldn't go up it, but if you continue up that road and look to the sides, you'll see the holes where folk's have been diggin'"
He showed me a colorful boulder in the back of his truck... piled on one side with yellow, clear, black and green crystals. The green/blue, which is somewhere between a turquoise and a lime, was amazonite- pronounced like the river.
He talked about a large champagne -colored topaz that a friend of his mother had found on the area and sold for $400, 000....
This mysterious crystal just keeps getting bigger and better!
He told me about some other places to hunt for other minerals, but I was too excited about the turquoise-colored crystals to pay much regard to what he was saying.
I was one of only three groups camping Sunday night. One party, a large man, camped across the path from me while the other was of many young people and was far down the road... though you could still hear them .. very, very well.... I would have referred to them as my piers- as most of you would have due to our common age- but I don't think I could be as noisy as this bunch was, nor as trashy or rude.. well, maybe the rude part...
They occupied the entire parking lot with SUVs, a dune-buggy, and a, international ( scout-type thing ) convertible that was literally held together with cut aluminum cans and duct tape. The clouds began clearing up for sunset and I hiked to the peak of the nearest granite hill for some photos. I did not bother securing my gear as I had for the cloudy night before.
Sometime after midnight we had a freak thunderstorm I woke up to a series of deafening claps of thunder and almost continuous lightning flashes that cast some pretty eerie silhouettes on my tent. Then the wind came- The left wall of my puny tent lay flat, cold and wet on my exposed face- I felt one of the anchoring spikes become loose and then I listened to the campsite fall apart. The lightning and thunder continued and the rain became heavier- until it was pouring! I heard a crash, some scrapping.. The first thought that went through my head was that a bear had raided my dirty mess kit in the bed of my truck- only a few yards away. The thought was a bit frightening, but was not completely random- a similar storm/bear/dirty mess kit incident had fallen upon me only a few years ago near Yosemite. I heard the steel pots and pans crash on the ground in between the roaring thunder and the sound of my measly shelter whipping in the harsh winds. the inside of my tent became wetter and wetter until my sleeping bag could not protect me from the cold air. - the water entered from a small vent that is sealed when the tent is staked to the ground, and from the ground on which I laid, which had become not a puddle, but a stream of water emptying into the campsite next to me.
The storm continued without showing any sign of weakening, but I was hardly conscious when I started hearing screaming from the young group down the road. I had only just dismissed the thought of a ferocious bear raiding my truck, so you can imagine where my imagination went when I heard the yells. The yelling and screaming, however, did not frighten me as much as they probably should have.. I did not believe that any bear would attack people when there were messy campsites to clean up. Somehow I was able to work out a theory of why the sounds I was catching glimpses of were not reason for fear...
The storm was relaxing and exhilarating at the same time and I found a rare peace in it that I was barely familiar with. Before it began to die down, a long while after it had all began, we had one more bout of nasty- scary- weather. The winds tore at my tent and he trio of pines that I was under. Thunder did not hesitate after lightning, but was heard as the light was seen and seemed not to wait either, for the previous bolt. I feared liftoff for a few moments and heard what I could only assume to be my heavy cooler being blown off the bed of the truck.
Again, I awoke some time before the sun. The first thing I noticed this Monday morning was that it was not nearly as cold as the previous morning. I could only barely see my breathe and a light jacket was all that was necessary. Despite the fact that I was very wet, I thought I could feel all twenty digits! When it became light enough to see, I made my way into the war zone that used to be my camp. The cooler was in two pieces and laid several feet from the truck. One fourth of the mess kit could have been found trapped under the wheel of my vehicle, while the other components were scattered (some hundreds of feet) some distance from it. .. with no bear marks or anything!!
The tarp that was tucked under my tent to keep the bottom dry only kept a pool of rain water and the entire area had even washed of much of its topsoil. The three pines that helped deter some part of the storm from ravaging my village were OKAY \, though despite clear, blue skies, they continued to drip on my pitiful tent. It could have been worse. I heated up some food and by the time the sun hit my wet camp I had everything drained and harnessed down to the cement picnic table in the center of the pad so that it would dry faster. I had no plans for Monday night, but I knew I would leave Spruce Grove. I enjoyed it, but there was SOO much to see!
I jumped into the creek again and found no gold, no lead, but some larger hunks of iron ore and a small handful of garnets. I sorted the stones at my table and tossed the smaller ones and other things. Steve joined me- he seemed as interested in the crystals as I was.. though I dont know if thats even possible. He told me that the storm we had experienced was very unusual... not only in intensity and duration, but most of all, in the time of night that it exploded.
It was not until about noon that my things were dry enough to pack up. I drove back down road77 and through lake george. I found no 'NFS 31rd", but passed a NFS road in it's supposed place. NFS94, i found, turns into 31 when it crosses county line several miles up. I crossed roads 200 and 201- and I drove until the road turned into a 4wd only, and I had to turn around. I drove for an hour or so, and maybe 30 miles on the rough dirt roads that branched from road94/31. .. never found what the man was talking about. Discouraged, I drove back into Lake George and found a ranger station. They had a small gravel parking lot with a large area map on the far side. I parked next to the only vehicle on the lot- a white SUV with New Mexico plates. I got out of he car and approached the map and the two men examining it. They greeted me and immediately asked if I knew where they could find the amazonite deposits that they were told were up road 94. (pronounced am Ah zoo nite)
I shared my story with them and we drove back up 94 together- the map said that 205 was the first right off of rd94 and my new partners said that they were told to go up he first right.
We did just that- I followed them up 94- about 1.5 miles up, we hung a right- and traveled forever! I turned around after we exited the National forest- Decided to go find someone who might have a clue about the mythical crystals!
When I reached Wilkerson pass, about 25 miles west of Lake George, I ran into a National forest visitor centre that seemed to be occupied. I entered the little shop and found a couple of rangers. I questioned the two older women, who had heard of the mineral, but that was about it. They gave me a few brochures and even went through their small library for me. Still, the only thing that they could tel me was that it existed in the surrounding national forest and was sought heavily by others like myself. I asked to look at their maps of the area north of lake george-
They showed me three. On the first map, the road was called 31, and 205 was non-existent.
The second map showed a road 205- on 94, not a mile from the main hwy. The third showed road 94, but again, no 205.
I examined the second map- the road that might exist- and decided that I would regret not going back to check it out.
I thanked them, and they asked me to bring them back a crystal of it.- I think that they were joking.
I turned onto road94, and passed the ranger station that was only a quarter-mile from the hwy. I continued for a short ways- watching the right side of my road for any possible invisible roads. It was only about another half-mile when I passed the white SUV on the side of the road
that I had met earlier. they were pulled just off the dirt road onto a 6-foot drive way. I turned around and pulled onto the side of the road next to them.
The father-son rockhounding team told me that they had spoke to the man who discovered the deposit; he owned a rock shop or somethin' in the area and gave them directions to this spot. They invited me to join them.. "he said to park here and climb up this hill until we see holes dug into the ground, " the older man told me. Again, I followed them , this time by foot. Road 205 was an old dirt road that had been blocked off for many years and converted to a hiking trail. We did not follow the trail, but cut strait up the rugged hillside to our right. It may have been only a few hundred yards before we found the first set of holes.- we followed the holes until the 
younger man found a small green chip. It was amazonite! We split up on the top of the hill- I went through the "tailings" piles of holes that had already been dug- and I had alot of luck!... well, I thought so...
I found small pieces- up to dime-size- of some of the darkest, most colorful amazonite Ive ever seen! One VERY colourful piece was even translucent!
I also found a larger, clean quartz point that was actually two at the base that tapered off to one point. Another exciting find was a small dark piece of amethyst and a huge hunk of smokey quartz- though this one was low quality. I met up with the New Mexico pair on the top of the hill- son was digging, father was examining some of the larger, exposed boulders. I showed them my collection and offered them each a nice crystal. Son told me that they were only interested in finding the rocks themselves, and gave me a few chips he'd gathered.
I bid them GOOD LUCK, and descended the hill.
They followed at a slower pace and met me at the road as I was packing my treasures away carefully. And though I was very excited about my finds, even this could not beat the garnets.
I stopped at the Wilkerson pass Visitor centre with two crystals- I left the rocks and some *general* directions for the determined hunter. From there, I drove north. 'Had to call my parents from the area and town of South Park -surrounded by all those incredible peaks- they dispise the show. At sunset I pulled into a familiar campground near grandby- a few miles south of GRAND LAKE and about 160 miles from Wilkerson Pass. I would be at Shadowcliff the following morning, though it HURT to leave the Lake george area. No matter how long I stayed there, I dont thing I will ever be completely satisfied with the trip- there is just too much to do and find in the national forest.
Stopped in Gradby to pick up a fishing licence.
It was an incredible sunset and nice, quiet monday night. I packed my stuff tight in the truck and kept food in the truck. 'Slept well.
I woke early, again- well before the sunlight had a chance to warm the area- and wondered down to the river. I fished- threw a little olive wolly bugger in- but never saw anything. A pair of otters played infront of me. Their curiosity brought them close- they dove, never to be seen again, when they got about 15 feet from me.
They are in the photo below- my flash went off, but it was still pretty dark. Look in the center of the reflection of the boulder.
They are in the photo below- my flash went off, but it was still pretty dark. Look in the center of the reflection of the boulder.
On my way back I climbed a rocky slope on which I discovered a colony/ pack/ school/ herd/ fleet/ army of Marmots. Marmots are a mid-sized squirrel/groundhog thing found all over the high rockies. They bark. 
When I returned to my truck- just as the sunlight reached it- I found a granola wrapper at the base of a tree. Another on the hood of my truck. When I peired into the vehicle, I found several more shredded amongst all sorts of crumbs. I'd been robbed through the crack (which was just about one inch) in the passenger side window. A evil laugh of a tiny squirrel rang from the limbs above me. The criminal was a small, grey, fluffy, pointy-eared demon... I'll get 'em back!
I stopped to photograph the marmots on my way to shadowcliff- after I cleaned up the granola wrappers...
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