Fieldtrip Report:
Wet and Wild Weekend!
Rockhounding in Raleigh,
October 7th, 2005
and
Standard Mineral Company,
Glendon, N.C.
October 8th, 2005
Fieldtrip Report:
Wet and Wild Weekend!
Rockhounding in Raleigh,
October 7th, 2005
and
Standard Mineral Company,
Glendon, N.C.
October 8th, 2005
Photos by: Lee Fleming and Rick Jacquot
_______________
The title says it all!, we had a wet and wild weekend with our friends in Raleigh on Friday and the rest of the MAGMA members on Saturday at the Glendon pyrite dig.
John D. and I started off our weekend Friday morning, we packed up and headed to Raleigh to meet with Lee and several other MAGMA members. It rained all the way to Raleigh, little did we know that this would help us on our fieldtrip once we arrived. We made it into town around 12:00 Friday afternoon. Shirley and Lee and "Rockin" Ron Helms were ready to show me and John D. a fun day of collecting. We headed to one of the many local mines in the area to search for minerals. The particular mine we visited was mined for metallic minerals.
One of the vertical shafts we encountered while at the mine, watch your step! I could not see the bottom of this one.
We searched the area dump piles for specimens, we found some unusual material, unusual for me anyway, one of the minerals mined at this location is called hubnerite, a reddish brown mineral which contains much maganese.
Hubnerite
We also found a lot of other interesting things, pyrite was abundant along with specimens of nice blue quartz.
Ron with a boulder he found in the woods, it has a nice vein of pyrite running through it.
John D. and Ron searching for specimens.
It was raining off and on as we searched the mine area, this was to our benefit as we came upon a pile of old drill cores from the mine, dry, these things are ugly and show little color, but when wet, you can see the amazing colors of the minerals found deep in the ground, we all collected several of these for our collections, I also picked up a bunch to give to Colorado to give to his earth science students.
A couple of the cores I collected, they show a variety of minerals to include: pyrite, blue quartz, white quartz, and hubnerite. Rough material was also found.
Same material as the cores, note the small pyrite crystal at the bottom right corner.
To answer your questions, no, that is not Mary Poppins!
Shirley on top of a huge pile of dump material from the mine, there were so many minerals to be found here, it would take years to collect a sample of each.
This modern mine tunnel ran under the dumps that Shirley was standing on.
We had a great day, I especially want to thank Lee, Shirley and Ron for taking the time to show us some of their local digs, after several hours at the mine, we headed back to Lees to get cleaned up, then we all headed to the local steakhouse for dinner where we spent the evening enjoying each others company and talking rocks, then back to Lees to spend the night and get ready for Glendon in the morning.
