FC-Treasure
Full Member
For spring break I took the family to Arkansas for diamond mining and crystal digging. The crystal digging ended up being one of our favorite activities. I guess it would be #1 except I took my eight year old daughter horse back riding. I'm afraid horses win out over crystals, but only barely.
We ended up going to The Coleman Miller Mountain Mine and dug through their tailing piles. I highly recommend this mine, the mine owner is a great guy and we left with two 5 gallon buckets of crystals. Dig Your Own Quartz Crystals
We dug for four hours. The first three were spent entertaining an eight year old and making sure she stayed out of trouble. I think just about all of my keepers were found during the last hour as we finally figured out what we needed to do to find decent specimens. We were digging in wet, gummy red clay and I finally realized that I needed to pay very close attention to each dirt ball that had crystal showing, no matter how simple it looked. You can't really tell what you have until you dunk it in water or hose it off. My best rocks started out as big mud balls with faint crystal showing. As I dunked them in a bucket of water and scrubbed, I began to see interesting formations. The anticipation of getting to see what you really had under the mud was quite fun.
I'm including some before and after pictures of some of the better crystals. The first set shows the crystals after the mud was removed and the second set shows them after three days soaking in "Super Iron Out".
We ended up going to The Coleman Miller Mountain Mine and dug through their tailing piles. I highly recommend this mine, the mine owner is a great guy and we left with two 5 gallon buckets of crystals. Dig Your Own Quartz Crystals
We dug for four hours. The first three were spent entertaining an eight year old and making sure she stayed out of trouble. I think just about all of my keepers were found during the last hour as we finally figured out what we needed to do to find decent specimens. We were digging in wet, gummy red clay and I finally realized that I needed to pay very close attention to each dirt ball that had crystal showing, no matter how simple it looked. You can't really tell what you have until you dunk it in water or hose it off. My best rocks started out as big mud balls with faint crystal showing. As I dunked them in a bucket of water and scrubbed, I began to see interesting formations. The anticipation of getting to see what you really had under the mud was quite fun.
I'm including some before and after pictures of some of the better crystals. The first set shows the crystals after the mud was removed and the second set shows them after three days soaking in "Super Iron Out".
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