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Red Cloud Field Trip 2002
By Steve Decker
On Saturday, April 6, 2002, Foundation members were given the opportunity to collect Wulfenite at the famous Red Cloud Mine as the guests of Bryan Lees.
Gary Spraggins and I rode to the mine together, leaving his house in Tempe before 6 a.m. and arriving at the mine about 10 a.m. There was a pretty good group of Foundationers digging all over the pit, which was much larger and deeper than on our last visit. The amount of overburden that must be removed to expose fresh vein material is staggering, and most of it is just barren rock.
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Harvey, Les, and I got some pictures, then the newspapers were replaced to protect the treasure for it's rightful owners. It was special pleasure to see such lovely crystals in the Earth where they formed. I hope that some wonderful specimens are removed from this pocket and preserved in a (our?) museum. It helps me remain optimistic that there are still some fine and beautiful things to be seen by the average collectors!
I found a place to dig that showed a lot of orange mimetite on the surface of some fractured rock, and stuck my trusty screwdriver into the cracks. Other collectors were making a lot of flying rock with hammers and chisels, but I find the gentle approach very productive at this locality. The rock will often fracture right where the lovely and delicate Wulfinite crystals grow, and if you are careful not to drop them, you can rescue the most fragile groups. By using this technique, and sharing efforts with the collectors to my right and left, I was able to get some nice specimens for the Arrowhead Geology Club, and one especially lovely specimen for myself!
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As soon as we arrived we began hearing about The Vug. What a sight that was, a long cavity coated with bright Wulfenite crystals, some in the 1 inch range! It was filled with newspapers when I first saw it, but the papers were removed for pictures, and it looked like this:
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This was certainly my best trip to the Red Cloud, and I am very grateful to Bryan Lees for allowing us to visit his property and collect. I hope that there will be other chances to visit this mine in the future, but that is not certain. However, I am sure that if we work together to find collecting opportunities, and continue to behave responsibly, we will be having fun and successful trips for years to come!
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