Quartz

[Upham]

Years ago I was out hiking. I love rocks so I saw this rocky area out in the woods and I gravitated towards it. When I got to it I found this huge granite boulder and all around it was shattered quartz rocks about 2 feet deep. To me it looked like some one in the past was taking the quartz and breaking it on the big granite boulder. Most of the quartz was under many seasons of leaves. When I got home I looked up why someone would dig in quartz and found out quartz and gold go hand in hand. I went back to this spot to try to find where the quartz was coming from but couldn't. Any ideas?
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[tonofsteel]

shattered quartz rocks about 2 feet deep.

it looked like some one in the past was taking the quartz and breaking it on the big granite boulder

Most of the quartz was under many seasons of leaves.

If there was that much broken up there I would wager that it did not come from too far away. If there is lots of ground cover and no obvious veins in exposed outcrops then I would look for signs in the lay of the cover and try track down and expose the ground under the cover assuming it is actually bedrock underneath. Maybe there is a dip or depression in the cover that could reveal where someone was chipping out the vein. I would look more to the ground uphill and to the sides. I am assuming that whoever was doing that would have been efficient and would try to avoid hauling all that uphill or too far away, looking for the nearest thing that could assist them.

 

[A2coins]

Wow thats a fun thing to research good luck

 

[tamrock]

Quartz and gold going hand is a bit of an overstatement. Silica the chemical formula SiO2, most commonly found in nature as quartz which comprises more than 10% by mass of the earth's crust meaning, it's pretty much everywhere on the ground, from the dirt that's plowed for crops to the beach sands on every coast. Not all quartz outcroppings will host gold within in it and really rarely do. Is there any history of gold mining at this area you found this outcrop?