​​As I said in last week’s article, I received my 2 boxes of ‘Dirty Quartz’ from the Jim Coleman mine. I emailed with Terri Coleman, and she could not be more helpful.    I was very excited to open the box and find some crystals on the top. The dirt settled a bit so I grabbed some of the quartz on top that looked nice and put it aside. I carefully poured the rest of the contents into a bucket so I could do a cursory cleaning of the batch.

I rinsed some of the dirt out of the bucket ‘o quartz and then took out some handfuls of crystals/mud  and put that into a large colander/strainer. I began rinsing and stirring and picking out the crystals, separating the nicest ones into a box, and the broken ones into another strainer.

​​I was thrilled at the variety of crystals, and the clarity of some were just amazing. It took at least 45 minutes to clean up that box, done in two batches. Ultimately, I had a box of ‘keepers’ to sort through, and the rest which I wasn’t sure what to do with.

​I brought the box inside and sorted the crystals onto a tray, by size, shape, clarity. Ultimately, I found some favorites which I put aside.

​All in all, I had a great time ‘finding’ these crystals. It’s quite a bit easier to find them in these bushels that they sell than at the mine itself. I loved both experiences, but Arkansas is quite a ways away from Abiquiu and sometimes you have to bring the fun to your home. I am already planning a trip to the Jim Colemen Mine to do a dig at their site. That will be next summer. I’ll save the second box I have for now, we have some grandkids coming later this summer. 

Brian Bondy
My usual rockhounding is northern New Mexico but this past week my rockhounding took me a little further.  Carol's made me promise to write about some rock and fossil collecting closer to home in the future.

​Moving on from there I went to the Ron Coleman Quartz Mine in Jessieville Arkansas. If you didn’t know, Arkansas is home to some of the best quartz crystal mines in the world. Several of the mines offer the opportunity to find your own crystals by digging through dump truck piles of dirt they bring up from the mine. Some of the mines have special offers where you can dig in a quartz crystal pocket in the mine itself. That’s quite a bit more expensive.

I had a great time digging through the piles and found some beautiful crystals. We were pressed for time and I probably only looked for about 90 minutes. Next time I’ll spend the day.
Ron Coleman’s mine is fantastic, but there is also a Jim Coleman. They have a fantastic rock shop at the turnoff for the mine. I went on their website later and bought a half bushel of mine material from them. I just received the 2 very heavy boxes from them about 10 minutes ago, so I’ll write about that experience next week.

​Google Quartz Crystal Mining in Arkansas - 
You will get several options for digging for your own crystals. I highly recommend it if you have the means.

Part 2, next week

I love butterflies and have always grown perennials that are good pollinators because they attract bees and butterflies as well as providing nectar for my hummingbirds. I also have milkweed plants growing in every open area on my property, and up until recently, used to raise a monarch or two from caterpillar to chrysalis to adulthood. Now that these butterflies are scarce I no longer do. This year I note that I am seeing fewer butterflies in general, much to my dismay. With one exception.
 
All summer long I have been entranced by the number of Fritillaries that have been fluttering through my garden since late May. Such abundance, when so many butterflies are disappearing! The days of taking any wild creature for granted are over for me, and that includes the insects I see.

Almost every day I spend a little time down in my field waist high in the milkweed searching for caterpillars and hoping for the sight of a Monarch. This summer I have seen five Monarchs in all and none have been spotted in my field. Of course Monarchs don’t need to feed on milkweed nectar; they have many other choices. And this year the milkweed flowers bloomed so early that most Monarchs weren’t even around to feast on the fragrant flowers. I usually don’t start seeing these beautiful butterflies until early July and sightings used to peak around the end of the summer here in Maine.  The startling flaming orange Mexican sunflowers and Liatris are favored monarch nectar blossoms neither of which I grow here because I don’t have full sun, but I do have Butterfly weed, lots of it, and twice a Monarch has visited along with clouds of Frittilaries.

Recently, while scooping up ‘toadpoles’ from the edge of the pond where marsh grasses, cattails, and bushes thrive, I had a conversation with my neighbor about some of the problems associated with people who left bright lights on all night around the lake. This woman missed the firefly display and was aware that light pollution was partially responsible for the loss of these beetles.
 
  When I first moved to the mountains almost 40 years ago I camped in the field next to the brook and couldn’t fall sleep at night because it seemed as if the field itself was on fire with thousands of magical lights that blinked as they skimmed the tall grasses, glowing like gold or emerald jewels. For a naturalist like me, the season of summer began with the days of longest light, thunderstorms, and the advent of fireflies lighting up the night. The loss of so many ‘lightening bugs’ impoverishes us all.
 
Fireflies have been around since the dinosaur era; these extraordinary insects are at least a hundred million years old with one group spreading through this continent and the other colonized Europe and Asia. There used to be about 2000 species of these insects; now many are facing extinction.

​We caught up with Ralph Vigil and asked him to tell us one of his favorite camping stories. It still makes him chuckle when he thinks about the time when he was about 12 years old and he went up into Santa Clara Canyon with his older brother Gilbert and two friends, Simon and Eloy. In those days anyone could go up into the Canyon but there were probably more bears than humans who did. Perhaps people held what they owned with a looser hand because there were fewer boundaries and nobody cared if 4 kids decided to go camping on their land. Ralph and his fellow adventurers liked to go high into the mountains and stay by the beaver dam at the river. They spent their days messing around and at night they would tell ghost stories. Since they didn’t have fishing poles they would dam the river with rocks so they could catch fish with their hands.
 
Ralph’s mother was widowed and she had 7 kids to feed so money was tight. The family wasn’t the only one struggling; many people in Rio Arriba county were poor. To earn money for their camping adventures, Ralph would collect cans and bottles for the deposit. He admits that he used to go behind the Granada Hotel and get bottles that had already been refunded and go return them at the Baragain. He used the money to buy cans of Pork and Beans and Vienna Sausages.