When our group climbed up the steep hill with Gary Jacobs, we started to see where we would be finding some of the latest geodes to come out of the Keokuk/Hamilton area. Gary started a fee mine about 5 years ago and does no advertising at all. Everything is word of mouth. I can tell you first hand after hunting here it IS well worth the 16 dollars per bucket to hunt here.

Digging at Jacobs’ mine is much easier than any other location we hit while on our trip to this area. All but a few inches of overburden is removed so you are right at the shale layer ready to burrow into geodes. We noticed that there are at least 3 different layers showing in this mine. The upper most limestone/shale layer is a rust brown color. Here you can find nice sized geodes all of which are hollow. The down side of this layer is that most are weathered pretty badly. As you can see by the ankerite pseudo of dolomite geode, it has been exposed to frost and water for a long period of time causing the Fe rich dolomite to change into ankerite. Most of the capillary pyrites and cubes have turned into hematite/limonite now. Found within these geodes as well are double terminated quartz crystals to 6 mm.

The next layer down in this stratum is a grey shale layer around 40 cm in width. Here is where you can find the awesome capillary pyrites in quartz, Alpha quartz, and even calcite geodes. Geodes in this layer range from 4 cm up to 18 cm. The larger flattened geodes are, more often than not, filled in with quartz crystals and are not worth filling your bucket with. By hefting your finds you can tell most of the time if there is a cavity or not. Some of the quartz geodes however can deceive you because of the high specific gravity of quartz. The thicker geode skin you find, the better condition you will find your inclusion minerals.

The lowest layer is semi-hard gray shale in which you find smaller but hollow quartz geodes to 5 cm. Most are only quartz with no inclusions inside. They still are very nice for the avid geode collector.

The dig at Jacobs’ mine consisted of Sue and Don Munro, Joe and Dori Beuker with sons Zack and Jacob, and Becki and I. We all had a grand time and filled our many buckets with some of the newest, coolest finds to be had in the Keokuk area.

The following pictures show some of the better finds from the day.