I have known about the Penfield Quarry for a long time, and have always wanted to visit it. Even before I got into rockhounding. Ellison Park, a local park that I have hiked many times, borders on the quarry, and I always wanted to go explore it. But I haven’t wanted to trespass on private property.
My wife and I joined a local rock club, and they had a field trip to the Penfield Quarry today. I had loaded most of the stuff in the car last night. We had to be at the quarry at 6:45am. I set my alarm for 5:15, and was awake before it went off. I get up, and vegged for a while and then got dressed, and finished loading the car. I brought all the tools I thought I might need. Basically the same kind of stuff I took to dig for Herkimer Diamonds. Sledges, bullpoint chisel, crack hammers, screens, pick axe, wedges, etc. I also packed our new hard hats. And we both wore our new steel toed boots.
We arrived at the quarry a little after 6:30 and there were a bunch of people already there. We hung out by our car, not sure what to do. Eventually we saw people heading inside the building, so we followed them. We signed a release form. Then it was time to head down into the quarry. We headed back to our car, and followed the line of cars to the area with filled with boulders.
We donned our hardhats, and headed to look at the boulders. We weren’t sure what to do, so we watched other people. I knew we were after fluorite, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I had seen pictures in my books, but that didn’t help. I asked a couple guys, and they said the fluorite was in vugs. Okay. So we got our tools, and started busting rock. I was splitting open cracks. We pretty much only found dolomite, these little white crystals. We moved to a different area, and were busting on some rocks. I found a big rock that was already cracked. I worked at splitting it open more to see what was inside. More dolomite and calcite. I managed to tear some skin off of one of my fingers, and came close to breaking one of my legs when the rock I was standing on moved. Oh the fun of it!
Someone found something and everyone got excited. I went down to look at it was a tiny crystal that sort of looked like a short brown pine needle. Apparently it is rare.
We also found some selenite which was kind of cool looking. I found a big yellowish cystal on top of some dolomite as well as some tiny clear crystals. I showed them to a couple other guys who looked like they knew what they were doing. these turned out to be calcite. It looked different than the calcite we found at the herkimer mines. Then we found a tiny brown crystal mixed in with dolomite. I showed it to one of the geology students, and he told me what it was. I thought it started with “sph” and ended with “ite”. Not sure. I looked in my books when I got home. Maybe he said it was a Sphalerite. We found another one as well.
Then I found a piece covered with dolomite, and a tiny speck of purple. It almost looked like an amethyst. I showed it to the geology student and he said it was fluorite and got all excited at this tiny bit. I commented that I thought that it would be larger. I showed him where I thought I got it, and he asked if he could work the rock. I told him go ahead. He worked it for a bit, then moved on.
We kept working at vugs and breaking rocks. A little while later, I found part of a crystal with some blue in it. This was larger. I showed it to another guy and he said it was fluorite. I went back and found there was more under where I found the piece. I set about with the crack hammer and bullpoint chisel to break away the rock around the fluorite. It was tough. I didn’t want to destroy the flourite. I worked my way in towards the fluorite. The big piece of fluorite was already broken into smaller pieces, and I started pulling out the pieces. We collected a handfull of fluorite pieces. We showed them to the college student. He and his friends ooohed and ahhed over the pieces. I showed them where I got it. There was still a little bit left showing. I let them have the rock. He and he friends went to work trying to break it apart.
My wife and I were hungry and tired, so we headed home. We will probably try to come back next time they let people in. It was kind of fun.
On our recent trip digging for Herkimer Diamonds, I also picked up and kept chunks of calcite. I didn’t know what it was until someone told me. I am still learning all this stuff. But it looked interesting, and some of it was hard to tell from the diamonds (quartz) while it was dirty/muddy anyway. It was just easier to throw it in the bag.
But now that we are home, I have been cleaning up all the stuff we found. I am actually surprised at how many small chunks of calcite that we collected. Most are small, but a few pieces are larger with small pieces of rock attached.
I was reading stuff on the web and I found some stuff talking about the calcite. From what I understand, the calcite is one of the last things to form, and can form around the quartz crystals. So some of my small hunks of calcite might have Herkimer diamonds inside them. I know for sure a couple pieces do since the crystal is partially exposed.
But something else I learned was that the calcite can be disolved by soaking it in white vinegar.
So I took a few of the chunks of calcite with exposed quartz crystals, and set them in a bowl with distilled white vinegar. Right away, tiny bubbles started coming off the calcite. I kept checking back and I could see the quartz crystals becoming more and more exposed as the calcite was slowly eaten away. I placed some more pieces of calcite in the vinegar that may or may not have Herkimer diamonds in them. When I got up the this morning, the chunks were smaller. The bubbling action seemed to have stopped, so I replaced the used vinegar with some fresh vinegar.
When we were down in North Carolina going after emeralds, and other gemstones, the most productive method was creeking. That was simply using a screen box and a small shovel to dig from the bottom of the creek, dump it into the screen, sluice it in the creek water and examine the rocks that were left.
When I got home, I decided to build a screen box. I have a small stream running through my property and was wondering what kind of rocks were in there. I searched the web for screen boxes, sluicing boxes and anything else I could find, and couldn’t find any plans or directions how to make one. I wish I had gotten close of pictures of the ones we used in Hiddenite, NC. Anyway, I have to wing it and design my own.
Parts lists:
8′ x 3.5″ x 1″ pine board (without any major knots and that isn’t too warped)
8 x 3″ exterior screws (or 16 screws to make a second screen box)
1 roll of 1/4″ screen/hardware cloth.
Staple gun/staples.
Using a miter saw, cut the board into 8 pieces of even length (about 12″ minus waste from cutting blade).
Drill two holes 1/2 inch from one end of each board, using a drill bit about the thickness of the screws you are using (I used an 11/64 drill bit). Start with two boards, lining up the side of one board with the edge of another board, then using my a with a phillips head bit mounted, drive a screw in. Then line up the next board, and drive a single screw in. Continue until all four boards were attached in a square shape. Make sure the frame is square, then procede to drive in the remaining four screws.
Once the frame is solid, lay the screen over the frame. Using some wire cutters, carefully cut a square that covers the inside opening of the frame. You want the screen to cover as much of the frame as possible without overlapping the outside edge of the frame. Cut the screen right along the crosswire so you don’t get little points sticking out. Once the screen square is cut, clean up any sharp points.
Position the screen on the frame. Then using the staplegun, staple the screen to the frame spacing the staples about every one to two inches along the edge of the screen. You may need to tap the staples down using a hammer.
Now you have a screen box! With an 8 foot board and a roll of screen, you can make a couple screen boxes.
Many of the Herkimer “diamonds” I dug from the ground were clear, but many were a sort orange/yellow color. I was told this was actually rust. A couple people told me that the rust could be removed by soaking the crystals in something called Iron Out. The one guy said he left his diamonds soaking in Iron Out overnight, and they were white the next morning.
So when we go home, I went to the grocery store and also to Target to look for Iron Out. But I didn’t see any. I found CLR (Calcium-Lime-Rust remover) and bought some of that. First, I cleaned the diamonds in water with dish soap and Oxyclean. Then I soaked a few of the diamonds in a mixture of water and CLR. After while we scrubbed on the diamonds, and some of the rust came off. But this was nowhere as easy as what I had been told about the Iron Out.
I did some research. I went online and checked out the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for both Iron Out and CLR to see if they were the same or different. I found they were not even close to the same thing. I managed to find some Super Iron Out at Lowes Home Improvement. I bought a 5 lb jug of the stuff for a little about $11. I found it was a powder, and not a liquid. The directions called for 1/3 or 1/4 of a cup into a gallon of water. I wasn’t using near that much water. So I guestimated and pour just a little bit in and put a few diamonds in. They bubbled for few seconds then settled down. I checked periodically and even in a short time I could see the rust color fading or disappearing altogether! Wow, it worked fast! I left the diamonds in the Iron Out overnight and most of them were clear by morning. A few still have rust stains, so after taking the finished crystals out, I replaced the water and added more Iron Out.
I took Friday off from work for a long weekend. We left home about 8am and got to the Crystal Grove Mine about 11am. We checked in, dumped some stuff off in our cabin, and headed of to the mine. There were already people out working. There were several mining sites to choose from, but the manager recommended the Tears of Wenedi location. I had read good things about this location on the web.
I had bought all my tools with me (sledges, shovels, claws, wedges, chisels, and crack hammers). I debated about the screen boxes. I ended up throwing one of them into the trunk.
I headed straight to the wall with visions of splitting off sections of rock and exposing vugs filled with Herkimer Diamonds. Two guys were already working on the wall with hammers and wedges. I found another place with a crack to work on. I worked on splitting off some rock only to reveal moer rock. Actually the first thing I did was to bash my hand with the crack hammer and take some skin of. It bled for a long time before finally stopping. The two guys broke off a lot of rock over the weekend!
After my attepts to break off chunks of rock proved to be non-productives, I tried breaking up smaller chunks of rock with the crack hammer looking for hidden vugs. I didn’t find much this way either. Occasionally I would find a chunk of rock with Herkimer Diamond attached to the rock. But when I attempted to break it off, or break the rock in the a smaller display piece, I usually succeeded in destroying the Herkimer diamond.
My wife had the dog on a leash, and sat over in the soft dirt digging. She found some stuff.
My next strategy with to walk around and just look for diamonds laying exposed on the ground. I found some this way, and it was a lot easier than breaking rocks.
Then I met a guy named Dave who was having luck using a screen box. He would collect a bucket of dirt, and then sluice it in one of the mud puddles on the mine floor. I tried this, and it worked very well. I found lots of shards, and some nice little whole diamonds as well. I collected my dirt from different locations. The most productive turned out to be below where the two guys were busting off chunks of rock. We asked them persmission to collection dirt along the the wall where they were breaking of rock, and they said okay. As I said, I found a lot of stuff this way. I kept the shard figuring that my wife could use them for her crafting stuff. I also found many pieces of calcite and rocks with what I think are dolomite crystals. I even found one little green rock that looked like some of the low quality emeralds we got in North Caraolina. I kept it. I seriously doubt it is an emerald though. After two days of collecting the quartz crytals like this, I was very sore. I also collected some small display type pieces of rock with exposed herks attached to them. I figure I will clean them up. Maybe keep one of them on my desk at work. I can give some away as gifts.
I would like to go back again sometime, and actually work on splitting off chunks of rock. I learn a lot about how it is done by watching the two guys do it.
Crystal Grove is located at 161 County Highway 114, St. Johnsville, NY 13452. Their phone number is 1-800-KRY-DIAM. They have a website at: http://www.crystalgrove.com