Squint said:
Hate to be a wet blanket but I have to say I would feel guilty taking that much stuff from a location. Being a family based fossicker I can't help but see how many other families would miss out if we all took this much stuff away. This is why prospectors are so tight lipped about there favourite locations. Sorry for the rant but I just feel this too much for any one person to have a use for.
Depends how much is there I guess.
I don't feel guilty about the 100kg or so of petrified wood, jaspers and chalcedonies I have from Riverslea crossing because the whole area is virtually made of the stuff (though it is destined to be drowned by the Rookwood weir - then nobody will have anything that hasn't already been collected from there).
I don't feel guilty about having probably a 20 litre drum or more of crystals and quartz pieces from Lowmead because they are so abundant (though faceting grade material is not).
I've been to places where the ground seemed to be virtually made of garnet (only a tiny fraction of which would have been even remotely gem grade).
And I certainly don't feel guilty about taking away as many sapphires as I can find on a fossicking trip.
Fossicking is by defintion hand-digging and requires many hours of sweat, toil, blisters and aching muscles and bones to often come away empty-handed. If you happen to strike it lucky by stumbling across a rich little pocket of something......I can't see too many people just leaving most of it behind.
There will always be differences of opinion as to what constitutes taking too much of something. To me, illegally bringing in an excavator and dump truck to a general permission fossicking area on private land without the owners permission and ripping out and making off with several tonnes of the material, resulting in the owner closing the site to the public was definately the wrong thing to do on multiple levels, legally and ethically. But I don't personally see anything wrong with what Dron has done. But that's just my opinion