Fieldtrip Report:

Diamond Hill Quartz Mine,
Antreville, S.C.,
March 13th and 18th, 2005

Official fieldtrip:
Mountain Area Gem and Mineral Association

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This is a preliminary report from our club fieldtrip last Sunday the 13th, John Deney was fieldtrip leader for this trip. I met with Dave L. and we headed to the mine, when we arrived around 9:30, Marvin , John D. and several others were already on site digging. I observed that someone, for whatever reason had covered the vein I had been working the previous week, this vein contained amethyst crystals in a sticky red clay as well as in pockets that you could pry apart to remove the crystals. I spent only 20 minutes or so removing the overburden from the vein and began to work it again. You will remember this pic from the previous D-Hill report, it has now been cleaned and shows the type of pockets I am talking about:

The cavity has crystals growing towards each other, if you are careful, you can pry the the piece apart and remove the perfect crystals, I left this piece intact because it has nice double terminated crystals growing to the top and bottom of the pocket.

You can find many perfect points by working the clay vein, I started off with several small pieces:

Throughout the day several people found some nice material, Carl Rogers found a nice double terminated crystal, a few hours later our member Jay found another large double terminated piece, I stayed in my vein the rest of the day and pulled out several nice perfect points, much of the amethyst here is water clear for faceting, but the uneven color makes it hard to find a good piece for cutting.

This piece was from our last club trip, I have since cleaned the brown coating off.

This 2" crystal has just a hint of amethyst at the top, but it is a perfect crystal with no damage so I had to keep it.

This large crystal still has a spot of the brown coating, I need to resoak it in the iron out.

At around 6:00 Dave and I decided to call it a day, the other members stayed and worked the area I was in, it was like a shark feeding frenzy, I could see sprays of blood and dirt flying up out of the pit as we left!. I made another trip back to the site on the 18th. The area was covered in 2-3 feet of loose material, I took a 5 foot piece of rebarb steel I found in the woods and began probing the floor of the pit, after a few minutes I started to hit solid material, I removed about 3 feet of overburden and sure enough, there was a 6 X 6 foot area of the orange stained plates with the manganese coatings, I removed several large plates and am in the process of cleaning them, I hope one will be as nice as the two foot amethyst plate that Frank found, I also found some other things that I will post as they are cleaned, one amethyst cluster found on the dump piles may end up in the Henderson County Museum, more to come 8^)

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