Ladds Mountain

Rick thought he had found one of his long lost relatives, but it turned out to be a dummy.

At around 11:00 we departed the museum and proceeded to our field trip location for the day. The Ladds Quarry had been worked since the late 1800's into the 1940's for limestone, while mining the quarry, extensive cave systems were discovered but were not preserved, they were blasted and destroyed during the mining process. Today the site is owned by Bartow County. There is a shooting range on the property which is used by local law enforcement. The county uses the old quarry area for a landfill for road construction debris, they allow rock clubs to collect at the site to find what is left of the cave formations such as: stalactites, stalagmites, flow stone, cave onyx, aragonite, calcite and more. Cave formations and cave systems are usually protected by the government for future generations to enjoy and collecting formations such as these is a federal offense in most of the country. You can legally collect these formations at this site, the area is being filled with trash and other debris by the local government and we, as rockhounds, feel it is better to collect, preserve, and display these formations in local museums such as the Weinman and in private collections to be shared by others. Rather than see them buried under a pile of rubble to be lost and destroyed forever. While at the site, I observed huge piles of used asphalt and downed trees that were not there the last time we visited, it may take several years, but sooner or later access to this location will be stopped.

We arrived at the site and followed the trail to the pit area. On either side of the pit there are the walls of the mountain, in the walls are small holes or openings of what were once cave systems and passages. These openings are at most a few feet deep, you can search the dump piles in the area to recover cave onyx and formations that have been buried, or get next to the walls and try to remove the hard flow stone from the limestone. This is hard rock mining and will take some effort to get quality pieces, but we managed to recover some impressive specimens. The county asks that you do not go to the top of the mountain to collect or try to climb the walls or repel off the sides to collect, a few years ago a woman fell from the top and was killed, I'm surprised they still let us in!