Fieldtrip Report:
Ten Days of Diamond Hill!
Antreville S.C.
May 13th-22nd, 2005Photos by Rick Jacquot, Lee Fleming
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My Rhodo bush at home, I took this while working on the camper Wednesday.
I returned to Diamond Hill on Thursday to find a few members collecting.
Thomas and Diana Davis.
On Sunday Chet and his digging crew had packed up and headed home, on Monday the club members began working in the amethyst pit, I worked that pit for about an hour one day, I observed a large boulder with a pocket of crystals lining the the walls, I tried to break down the boulder but realized that I would not be able to remove the crystals intact, inside the pocket was a mass of red clay, I dug into the clay and removed an unusual specimen.
This mass of crystals was a floater piece in the pocket incased in the clay, it is covered on all sides with perfect undamaged crystals, very cool.
Thursday night it rained hard all night, thunderstorms pounded the area, Friday morning was a mess for digging and not many showed for the day of collecting, Gerald Reel and his Son did show however and were able to recover some nice crystals in the amethyst pit.
Gerald Reel cleaning a crystal.
Steve Barr and Annie had joined me Friday as well, we spent the day surface collecting while Gerald and Son dug into the walls of the amethyst pit.
Steve Barr found this cool triple double terminated cluster on the smoky quartz dumps, part amethyst and part smoky.
I did a lot of surface collecting Friday, I also brought along a mason jar to catch a scorpian, I had heard that they were fluorescent, I finally found one on the dumps and put him in the jar.
Here is my scorpian friend in daylight.
And here he is under shortwave UV light.