Fieldtrip Report:
Fieldtrip Report:
Jackson
Crossroads
Amethyst Mine
(JXR)
Wilkes County, Ga.
November 26th, 2005
photos by: Lee Fleming and Rick Jacquot
We didn't have a club trip planned for this past weekend, but I can't stand to stay home and not dig on a perfectly good weekend, a few of us decided to head down and check out Rodney Moores mine at Jackson Crossroads in Georgia. He has been working this mine for amethyst for some time now and we wanted to try our luck at finding some of the nice gems we had seen found by several of our other members. Friday morning I headed out to meet with Steve Barr and John Deney, we arrived at the site around 1:00 to find Lee Fleming already there. We met with Rodney, he showed us around the site and told us where we could and could not dig the next day (Saturday).
If you visit the site, make sure to stay on the JXR property, the mine is bordered by at least two other claims.
Rodney has placed new signs to the property that make it easier to find.
Rodney on his backhoe.
We watched a while Friday while Rodney opened a new hole at one end of the site, there were a couple of very nice facet grade pieces found.
That afternoon we followed Lee on a leisurely tour of Georgia as we made our way to the motel for the night, two hours later, we checked in, had dinner and sat around that evening coming up with a game plan for the next day.
Saturday morning came early at 6:00 a.m., we all got ready and headed to the local Huddle House restaurant for breakfast, Lee and I had the big breakfast deal ($5.99) lots of food, I don't know what John and Steve had, we had to sit at seperate tables, the booths were to small for our little group.
Having never been to the mine before, we tried a variety of ways to find amethyst, you can break the boulders strewn about the area to find crystals in matrix, rake through the dumps to find pieces Rodney missed with the backhoe, or work the hardrock walls in the pit to uncover crystals, we all tried our hand at different techniques. I have to say that this site is a thumbnail and micromounters dream if you're into quartz crystals, we all found our share of these as we dug.
Lee working the dumps.
Below are pics of some of Lees rocks:
