Fieldtrip report:
Standard Mineral Company,
Glendon, N.C.
October 16th, 2004
by Bill Conklin,
photos by Lee Fleming________________
Just a couple quick updates on the Standard Mineral dig on the 16th...My wife, my son and I arrived at 7:30 to find about 15 people already working in the mine- signed the waiver and strode in. Within another 20 minutes or so the road leading in was jammed with cars and waves of folks descended on the site. This was our first visit and initially it was easy to check with a few folks who had been there before on what the lay of the land was and what this place was all about- later, though, the work got serious- and frankly by mid morning it seemed like there was one person for every ten square feet of tailings, dozens of metal detectors beeping ( um, headphones, people ?) and it was all heads-down diggin.
We ran into Randy Thomas, who generously snatched a piece of matrix from the roped off area ... yes, there was a generous section of the mine roped off- some people alleged the "best part", etc. , others said the least stable. Between you and I, the truth was in the middle; I found the section we were in was a cross between walking on wet soap and a loose scree talus, and a few very wet spots swallowed an unsuspecting rockhound or two...anyways, Randy dropped this eighty pound section in front of my wife, who set to removing some of the smaller pretty pyrite cubes and breaking off smaller manageable matrix pieces.
I found a few nice larger cubes but frankly my metal detector, a Tesoro Bandido II, didnt seem to be the ideal tool for this- it took me a couple hours to get the signal right so that I could reliable "hear" the pyrite.
Later, we ran into Randy again after I had gone back to the Jeep for my sledge- I needed a break from swinging the detector and a little rock bustin was called for- Randy had his eye on a large chunk of quartz and borrowed my sledge. We worked that till it was smithereens but other than a small quartz vug and some pyrite in quartz matrix nothing else turned up. I was unable to find any flourite other than a small, bb sized bleb in a piece of quartz that was pretty shattered and fell apart on sight. Oops!Time ran out just as I started to heat up on the detector again and Randy herded us all back to our cars so he could lock up. I made a special point of going back to thank him for his help and hard work, which he modestly poo-pooed, but we all know it must be a pain to be responsible for a hundred people running around a working mine !
Tally: a few nicer large cubes, some small pretty cubes in matrix and lots of loose cubes. One wound from a quartz shard. Next time I go back I think I would be more effective in terms of how to dig the larger stuff, and definitely again will keep an eye out for other stuff- if its there...
Bill
Road leading to dump piles.
MAGMA member Brian Taylor at Glendon.
Below are some pics of the pyrites that Lee Fleming found.
