Crystal hunting the goldfields leads to our rarest find! Crystals Everywhere At The New Spot!!

We headed back out to the new patch we found last week, it turned out to be one of our most fruitful days out the bush! This is another area riddled with old reef mines where the old timers had worked the richly auriferous quartz reefs back in the 1800s. Just about every old gold mining method has been used in this area, from small reef workings of no more than a meter wide, to huge open cut mines, deep shafts, adits, surfacing and hydraulic sluicing where they used water cannons fed by gravity to blast away entire gullies and direct the material over long sluice boxes. A prime spot for gold prospecting in a modern day but also a prime spot to find crystals! Most of the time, crystals were either discarded as waste or went unnoticed as the old timers had little interest in carrying what was essentially worthless rock back then. Fast forward 180 odd years into a time where human kind has a bit more time to play and enjoy their leisure and their scattered remains of a bygone era become a playground for gold prospectors, crystal fossickers and history buffs alike!

On this trip, we found not only some really pretty clear and white quartz crystals, but a crystal with a rare calcite inclusion known as a "Lodolite phantom". A beautiful calcite crystal form inside a clear quartz crystal that grew around it, taking on the same form as the calcite, creating a green crystal inside it's clear quartz shell!! Amazing stuff!!

Lots of tips and insights along the way in this video as we discover the different features of the landscape and decipher the old timers clues left behind. We hope you enjoy the slightly longer form video and maybe learn a thing or 2 along the way about how to find crystals and where to look or even a little something on the history of the old workings, we had a lot of fun on this one too!

Peace!

Jim & Tay