Fieldtrip Report:

Diamond Hill Quartz Mine,
Antreville, S.C.,
March 5th and 6th, 2005

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John, Cindi, and Andrea in the pit where the amethyst was found, everyone found at least a crystal, some found some nice large clusters.

Amethyst crystals in a pocket, I found this one in the pit early Saturday morning.

Perfect amethyst points from the pit with a coating on them, I am cleaning the coating off and will add the cleaned pics to the report later, the largest crystal is 2" long.

Also found in the pit are these heavy manganese coated crystals, this is a small specimen to show you what they look like, Frank and Marvin recovered plates 2-3 feet in diameter, the largest plates I have seen.

As soon as Jerry turned his back to man the grill, Tena was all over John D.!!!

More of our new members Floyd Allen and family working the Smoky quartz pit.

All to soon the day was coming to an end and our Saturday only members headed home. The rest of us prepared our camps for the night and cooked dinner and then sat around and talked rocks, minerals, and rocks, we could'nt think of anything else to talk about! After it was dark I remembered that I had brought along my "Superbright 2000" Shortwave UV light, we decided to check out the dump piles for fluorescent minerals, much to our delight, we found some very nice pieces:

Quartz crystal plate glowing a bright green under shortwave UV light, our club mineralogist Curtis says this is caused by an inner growth of hyalite opal, very cool!

Quartz crystals under shortwave UV light.

This is the coolest specimen yet!, the two inch skeletal quartz crystal on the left glows green, on the right the other crystal had been broken off, it glowed blue with the face of a skeleton on it!!!

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