[Rockhounds] Falls Fossil Festival

[Alan Goldstein]

Well, the 13th Falls Fossil Festival is history. Saturday was busy, Sunday was quieter but still steady. The weather was perfect. We had a 15 minute downpour about an hour before the show started this morning - with one clap of thunder. 

The star of the Festival this year was the "Mineral Collecting Pile" from the fluorspar district. Someone told me a geology club came up from Lexington, KY specifically to collect in the pile! I would guess that of the 15 tons in the pile, well over a ton of rock was removed from it yesterday and another nearly another ton was taken out today! It is really rich in minerals. I picked up a nice cube (which I gave to a volunteer) because there is a lot of sand-size particles mixed in that help protect crystals from being pulverized to dust. A child picked up a partial crystal (yellow & purple with chalcopyrite inclusions) that could be chipped into a decent size octahedron. One woman found an 8" rock with yellow fluorite that contained a vug with a beautiful 5mm spray of strontianite. That had to be from the Minerva No. 1 mine. I've still got my specimens in HCl, but will check on them tomorrow. Next year we may bring down two truck loads - 30 tons - of material. You can't even tell anything was removed from the dump in Rosiclare. It looks like it has been scraped, but not excavated. 

The Waldron shale fossil pile wasn't attacked nearly as much, so it ought to produce some excellent fossils over the next year. 

The 2008 Falls Fossil Festival is Sept. 20 & 21.

Alan 

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