The turn off to Plush on county road 310 isn't very well marked, but I had consulted the map and knew about where to find it. Even so, I did have to stop and back up after going by it! County road 310 is a very well maintained gravel road, but again, most of the sign's showing where to turn off of it to get to the sunstone area had been vandalized or torn down and I had to backtrack several times to find the right ones. I had driven straight thru so it was very early in the morning, 3:30am, by the time I arrived at the public sunstone area. I parked my pickup and immediately crawled into the back for some sleep.
At about 7:30am my rockhounding partner woke me up to tell me he needed out to use the restroom. Being a Brittany Spaniel, he could'nt operate the door knob to the camper without my assistance. Well, since I was already up and the weather was gorgeous I decided to get a start on finding some of that beautiful sunstone! Here are a couple pictures of my pickup parked at the sunstone area and some views of the surrounding area.
The ground in the public area looks like there has been a cosmic sized car wreck as the sunstone laying about reminded me of the broken window glass from a car wreck. The biggest problem I had was restraining myself from reaching down to pick up pieces that were too small to cut. I had brought an Estwing "Gem Scoop" with me, but the slot's in the scoop were too big for most of the pieces and they would just fall out. You will definitely get some great exercise and do lot's of bending over to pick up sunstone. The majority of the material found on the public area, which is a total of 2,500 acres, are clear, straw and champagne colored. Occasionally you will find a shiller or two, but they are few and far between. I collected until about 11:30am and then took a short nap. A little more rested by 2:30pm I returned to collecting and did so until about 7:30pm. All in all, I collected about 2 1/2 lbs. of really nice material. By this time the camper was looking real good!
On tuesday morning I decided to wander over to the Dust Devil Mine to see if they were open to collecting. There I met Steve Hackler, one of the 3 owners of the Dust Devil Mine, Bob and Teri Fittro and Sid (didn't catch Sid's last name) who are regulars at the mine. I was well recieved and made very welcome by them and after signing a release headed down into the mine's pit to start digging. I started out using one of the many screening units that the mine has there for the customers to use. The screens are two part, one is 1/2" mesh and the other is 1/4" mesh and stack on top of each other. The screen boxes are set on frames with pvc pipe rollers and you can rock the screens back and forth to sift the material. I ran about a dozen screen loads thru, finding lots of smaller pieces, when Bob came down and started to go thru the same pile of material I was working on with his rock pick. He said that he prefered to do his searching in this manner and felt that he could move more material in a shorter time this way. After he found several large pieces of heavy shiller in this manner I was convinced and joined him with my rock pick raking the piles! I spent a total of about 10 hours in the pit with a lunch break in the middle. I also took about 2 1/2 lbs. of sunstone out of the pit, but the quality was far superior to anything I found in the public area.