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[Catahoula]

Hello All,
Another puzzle for you. Location is the Southern Sierra Nevada of California. Locality is in proximity to a known sphalerite deposit and there is considerable garnet on epidote (a flat garnet, not shaped). Vast amounts of common opal (Green and Yellow) and jasper in a limestone dike. A fun place to hunt.

The canyon where this resides hosts a small hot springs. Out of curiosity we used a gold pan to test the hot spring, hoping that the sub-terrain waterway would bring out some garnet or sphalerite. Indeed, each pan was littered with hundreds of sand-grain sized granules of perfectly translucent, ruby colored grains. We excavated significantly with similar results, but nothing larger than about ½ carat.

The question is not "What is it", the question is, what are the odds of finding larger specimens? Am I better off continuing to excavate in the spring, or, should I be hunting the canyon itself? Any ideas?