Well I sit here in my hotel room typing this as the president of my club and my collecting buddy are talking about what they found today. My trip started out at 2:30am on Friday morning when my friend Mell picked me up and we headed south towards Bloomington Indiana. Our purpose was to do some collecting during our clubs major summer trip. This is actually the first major club trip I have been, this is not to say I haven't been on club trip because I have. Well got to Bloomington in 2.5 hours which is amazing because it normally is a 3.5 to 4 hour trip depending on the traffic.

The first stop was to collect on 446 south east of Bloomington to collect at a road cu the is known for yellow, pink, and white Calcite. Well this site was a bust because there was non to be found, it may have been there but I was not in much of a mood to scale lime stone off the walls. This would ave been to much work at to dam early in the morning to do this type of work. So we headed up to a creek to bust some geodes, at 7:30am the water was COLD COLD COLD. We spent about an hour at this site busting geodes and we got some nice hollow quartz geodes not much to get excited about but a better start the the road cut. We left this site and tooled around to various creeks an rivers in Monroe county looking for geodes. We did very good the majority are about the size of a basketball to half that size. They will take a bit of cleaning up to really make them look good. The bright spot in finding them is the first one I cracked although its one of the smallest its quartz is smoky on its tips to half. We met up with our club at the I64/Indiana37 road cut also called the Sulfur road cut. This has never really been my favorite site to collect because its high and steep and the area is covered with spider webs. Those three things are very close to the top of my list of not so fun thing to encounter. Mell and myself headed to the hotel after looking for stuff for about an hour. Most of what you can find there are Blastoids, Archimedes's, and the very rare and nearly imposable to find shark teeth.

Saturday we meet at the Corydon Indiana quarry. This site is very well known for its very pink Dolomite, its Calcite, and less for its purple Fluorite. This quarry has not had a shot of material since last fall they have been operating on just what they have shot so the real prospect of there being nothing to collect was a worry. When we were told it was ok to collect it was a very short time before we started to find quality dolomite and calcite. I very quickly found a boulder that was about 8 foot high and at least 4 feet long and as wide. It had a nice pocket of Pink Dolomite with very large dogtooth white calcites. I worked on this rock for over 2 hours. Cutting it with a rock saw and blasting away wit a 22lb sledge knocking off the corners and edges till I was within 4 inches of the vug. I was able to make 3 more cuts with a friends rock saw and to use a wedge to pop the bottom of the vug off, its over 9 inches long and 5 inches wide. Over 70% of it is covered with the white dogtooth calcite, a very nice piece to add to my collection. The rest of the pocket came out in 5 chunks if I wanted to I could put it back together, but I don't think that going to happen. Once I was done smashing this boulder down to size I took some time to drink a couple bottles of ice cold water. and to relax and bask int he glory of not smashing this vug into little tiny bits. Also i was able to get a nice wash fluorite nodule from the same boulder. Its not the best looking thing, but its the first fluorite Ive found at Corydon. Which reminded me that I actually found more fluorite but it was on a boulder that the size of a van and the fluorite was small cubic but they are the size of sand grains. They were over an area 2.5x2.5 feet. The top of the boulder is 15x10 feet so it was not even an option to get this, I left it right were I saw it. As I was driving away from the quarry I remembered that I forgot to get a picture of this boulder.

At noon we left the quarry and headed to Sellersburg Indiana quarry what can be found there is pretty much all fossils. But I managed to find a nice brachipod filled with calcite. I was also able to find a nice cystoid head, crinoid head, as well as 5 spiny snails one of which I gave to one of the junior members of our club that was having a not so good day collecting. By the time we were don't it was 4pm and I was very ready to head back to the hotel and to take a shower and to site in a nice air conditioned room. But alas this was not to be because as you remember the president of my club showed up to ask Mell and myself some question which I cant say I answered or even listened to.

I have to say this so far has been a very good trip. Pictures will follow in the next day or so.

Byron

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