Trona Part 3.

At any rate, the black mud was super viscous and much harder to clean off my crystals than anticipated. I quickly decided I was wasting time attempting to clean them there and instead unloaded my haul into a different bucket in the trunk and and headed back out there.

This was what my shoes looked like before heading back out the second time:

By this point, things were pretty well picked over, (there were a lot of people there) but I still managed to collect several more really nice fist sized crystals. I headed back to the car with my finds, packed up, and headed back to the gem and mineral society.

Here is what my shoes looked like when I'd finished at the mud pits (they got sucked clear off my feet twice!):

[I still have to email the photos of the actual crystals from my phone to myself so I can upload them here, because I cannot for the life of me figure out how to work blogger from my smart phone...actually, I can't really figure out how to work anything on my smartphone except facebook, and that's only because it already had an app thing installed on it. Lol. Technology and I are not friends. At any rate, I'll try and get them up for you today-ish.]

In between field trips I wandered around, I ate lots of tasty things (they were selling something called "pepper bellies" which I ordered out of sheer curiosity, and it turned out to be Frito pie. I've never heard it called a pepper belly before, but it was still delicious. :) I bought lost of pretty things, and then wandered back to the car to work on cleaning the mud off some of my crystals, and to wait for the next trip to begin.

The second trip was to the Blow Hole. Basically, this whole area sits above a giant underground brine lake. All of these precipitate minerals grow down there in large formations, and once a year they drill holes in the ground, lower a hundred pounds of dynamite into each hole, and then detonate it to blow all those formations into smaller pieces. Then they lower this pipe attached to some sort of machine and it sucks up the brine and crystals and blows it all out over the ground so we can pick through the crystals.

I have a video of it on my phone, and if I can figure out how to get it on here, I will totally post it for you. If not, the dirty jobs episode "mud excavator" covers all of this pretty well. :)

Anyway, the Blow Hole is where my creeper troubles started, but I'll leave as much of that out of my story as possible because, really, it's just not that interesting.

The crystals I got here were prettier than the ones I got from the mud pits (and way cleaner), but significantly smaller. Here's a picture of the ground, totally covered in crystals.

And one of a hanksite crystal I found:

My computer is dying now Dear Friend, so more later, as always. I miss your face woman! So much!