We enjoyed digging and screening for emeralds and other gemstones down in North Carolina. We looked for some place closer to us in New York. There really isn’t much in the way of good gemstones in New York. Oh well. But there are the Herkimer “Diamond” mines over in the eastern part of the state.
We had known about the Herkimer Diamond mines for years, but had never been there. We decided it might fun to try. Our wedding anniversary was coming up, so I thought it would be fun for us to get away, and maybe trying digging for “diamonds”.
Herkimer Diamonds are not real diamonds, but are double terminated, water clear quartz crystals. Supposedly they are rarer than real diamonds. Rare or not, they are nowhere near as valuable as real diamonds.
There are several Herkimer Diamond mining places. I did some research, and several reports seemed to indicate that Crystal Grove was the best place to get diamonds.
I took Friday off from work. We left about 8am and arrived at Crystal Grove a little after 11am. I had reserved a cabin weeks earlier. We checked in, paid for a couple days of mining, and unloaded some of our stuff in the cabin. The cabin smelling great, like freshly cut wood.
Then we headed down to the mine. There are actually several mining locations, but the proprietor said the Tears of Wenedi mine was the best. I had bought various tools such as a new sledge, shovel, wedges, and crack hammers. I made some wedges from spring steel leaf springs as mentioned in various articles. So the first place I headed to was the wall. A couple serious guys were already working on one piece of the wall. I found some other places, trying to find some cracks. I found some small cracks, and worked on splitting them open. Within the first few blows of the hammer on the chisel, I managed to hit my knuckle and was bleeding all over the place. It didn’t hurt, and eventually I got it to stop bleeding. I did succeed in splitting off some small pieces of rock, but only revealed more rock. Over the weekend I did learn more about how to split off big chunks of rock by watching the two guys. They broke off a huge amount of rock.
When trying to break off chunks of rock wasn’t working, I tried breaking smaller chunks of rock with the crack hammer. This wasn’t very productive either. My wife chose to dig over in the soft dirt, and she was managing to find some stuff.
I started searching the ground, looking for flashes of reflected lights. This was producing more than digging at the wall or breaking rocks.
I hooked up with a guy named Dave and he showed me how he was finding diamonds. He was filling a bucket with dirt, and then screening it in one of the mud puddles. Fortunately I had brought one of my screens from home. This method worked very well and was very productive. The trick with this method was where to get your dirt. I tried digging mud out of the puddles, dug dirt from the base of the wall, dug dirt out in the open. The best place seemed to be long the base of the wall. Dave asked the couple serious guys if he could take dirt from where they were working and they said okay. I asked them too, and they said okay for me too. This produced the best stuff. Much of what we found were shards of broken Herks. But I kept most of these thinking my wife might still be able to use them for her crafting. But I found many small doubly terminated crystals, crystals with attachment points, and crystals still attached to small pieces of rock. I also found chunks of calcite, and rocks with what I think were dolomite crystals. Anyway, I did this for two days in a row and feel like I was beaten with a baseball bat. It was hard work!
My wife had our dog on a leash, went and dug in the soft dirt that was in the shade most of the day. She found some nice stuff too, but not nearly as much as I got. It was nice that we were able to bring our dog and not have to check her into a kennel.
The campground itself was nice. The cabin was clean and had a small space heater as well as a ceiling fan. The ceiling fan didn’t seem to do much however. I think it was mounted too close to the ceiling. Opening the windows and get a cross draft worked better. The bathrooms were clean. The showers were decent. They are different in that you have to pull a cord to get water, which will shut off when you release the cord. So you end up showering with one hand up in the air and scrubbing with the other.
Check out was the only issue. We packed our car up and were ready to leave before 8am. But there was nowhere to leave the cabin key. There was a drop box to leave checkin stuff for overnight arrivals, but the slot was too narrow for the key chain to fit. The office was scheduled open at 8am, but according to their website, they may not open till 10am early in the season. Fortunatly the manager came out to check on her dog which was barking at our dog, and I was able to give her the key.
I enjoyed our visit, and would like to come back sometime.
Crystal Grove is located at 161 County Highway 114, St. Johnsville, NY 13452. Their phone number is 1-800-KRY-DIAM. They have a website at: http://www.crystalgrove.com
We had so much fun digging for emeralds down in Hiddenite North Carolina, that we wanted to do something else. We live in New York state and have heard about the Herkimer diamond mines for years. First, Herkimer diamonds aren’t really diamonds, but are some really neat quartz crystals. The are already in crystal shape when you pull them out of the ground, and they can be water clear.
There are actually several mines in the area. The most well know is name Herkimer Diamond Mines. But there is also the Ace Of Diamond Mine and the Crystal Grove Diamond Mine. I had seen the Herkimer Diamond Mines and the Ace Of Diamond Mine on TV of Cash And Treasures. But I found great reviews of the Crystal Grove Diamond Mine on the web. They are all up in the same area, so have the same Herkimer diamonds.
My wife and I have a wedding anniversary coming up, and I thought a weekend trip might be a fun way to celebrate it. I talked to my wife and she thought it would be fun. I decided to go with the Crystal Grove Diamond Mine. I liked the reviews. They also have a campground. I reserved a cabin for a couple days.
I have also been researching tools. I rewatched the Cash And Treasures episode and have been reading web sites. I have a few tools that we can use already such as a seldge hammer, pick axe, small hand shovel, and garden claw. I bought a better digging shovel than what we already had. I figure I can use it around the house. Also I ordered a Estwing Gad Pry Bar which many web sites recommended.
Today at lunch, I stopped at Harbor Freight and bought a 45 inch crow bar. I figure it might come in handy. I am still looking at buying a crack hammer and a bull point chisel.
We already have some saftey glasses. I have a pair of work gloves, but we will probably want to get another pair for my wife. Chances are that I will be doing some heavy duty breaking, or trying to anyway, while my wife is digging through the dirt, or breaking smaller rocks. It’ll be fun!
My wife are always looking for interesting things to do. One day we stumbled across a show titled Cash and Treasures on The Discovery Channel. Thee host Kirsten travels to various places and hunts for valuable stuff of some sort. One of the episodes took her to North Carolina to search for emeralds at the Emerald Hollow Mine.
My wife and I were planning a trip to Virginia Beach, VA and realized that the emerald mine in North Carolina was about 5 hours drive away. We decided to do it. Our plan was to do at least one day, or possibly two days.
We arrived in Statesville, NC, on Monday, which is only about half an hour drive from the mine.
We got up early Tuesday morning, grabbed a free breakfast at the hotel, and headed for the mine. We were there shortly before they opened at 8:30am. We parked, and headed to sign in. The guy wasn’t ready yet, so we waited. Be careful with this guy as he is kind of gruff. After a bit he was set and read to go. We purchased the combo permits that would allow us to digging, creeking, and sluicing. I told him we only needed a single digging tool set. I didn’t figure my wife would be doing any digging. We got our free buckets of dirt, and sluiced them. They were pretty obviously seeded with various small chunks of quartz and other stuff. Nothing valuable. There were other buckets that you could buy that were seeded with other stuff. But we wanted to dig, and find stuff. So we took our shovel and bucket and headed off to dig. We only knew the general area where were supposed to dig, but we had no idea of the best places to dig. In the red dirt, or brown dirt? Deep? Shallow? Near chunks of mica? We had no idea. We dug some dirt in one spot, filled a bucket, and carried it back to the sluicing area. The five gallon bucket was kind of heavy when filled with dirt. We sluiced the dirt finding not much but very small pieces of quartz. We made multiple trips back to refill the bucket for different areas, but for the most part found very little except very small pieces of quartz.
We were kind of disappointed, and had petty much decided that we wouldn’t be coming back the next day.
We got kind of got tired of carrying the heavy bucket, so we turned in the bucket and shovel. We wanted to get a couple of the creeking setups. The gruff guy said we only paid for one. I told him that I wanted to get a second one and was willing to pay for it. But he was kind of a pain, so we just let it go and headed down to the creek with the one kit. The tools are just a small handheld gardening shovel and a small screened box.
The creek produced stuff much better than the digging. The pieces of quartz were larger, and nicer. We were also finding amethyst, blue rocks, green rocks, orange rocks, and who knows what else. We don’t know what half the stuff we got are. Our opinion of the place changed, and again we were talking about coming back for the second day and just do creeking.
So that is what we did. We came back on Wednesday morning, just bought the creeking permits, but this time we paid for two creeking tool kits. We head straight for the creek. This time I planned to skip most of the quartz stuff and focus on finding the other more interesting stuff. And I found a bunch of interesting stuff. I tried various strategies such as digging in front of big rocks, behind big rocks, under rocks, in deep pools. These all yielded colorful stones. Also productive was walking through the creek and watching for colored stones. I found a bunch of cool rocks like this.
We also bought a $25 Killer Beryl/Emerald bucket. The bucket again was obviously seeded. But we got a bunch of emeralds from the bucket. I am sure the emeralds and other stones that came in the $25 bucket are worth much less than the $25. I still think that best bet is to come, get the creeking permit, and head for the creek. Don’t expect to find anything super valuable. Just plan to have fun, and find lots of pretty colored rocks. But then again, you may get lucky. Also, I am sure the lady from Cash & Treasures got special treatment. Don’t think that you will get the same. Some of the staff were very friendly, others were not so much.
Overall, we had fun, and got a lot of pretty rocks for my wife to play with making jewelry.
Emerald Hollow Mine is located at 484 Emerald Hollow Mine Dr., Hiddenite, NC 28636, (828)632-3394.
* I went back and rewatched the Cash And Treasures episode where they went to the Emerald Hollow Mine. One thing that I was was the girl got to dig in area that is not available to the general public. It was roped off, and reserved for school groups. She also had a guy with her showing her where to dig. My wife and I and as far as I know, no one else was even given a clue as to where to dig other than in the broad digging area.
* Also, we have been sorting through our rocks. We believe that we got more emeralds than we originally thought. Many of them came from the emerald bucket that we bought. But we may have found some while creeking as well. Not sure. We also have a couple small pieces that look different. I think they might possibly be hiddenite crystals.
A few years ago, my wife bought me a Garmin V, and I have used that on many trips. It has usually been usefull, but there have been times when I wanted to throw it out the window. Like when it would decide for no particular reason that I was off-toure and start recalculating the route causing me to miss a turn and have to backtrack.
On Black Friday (the day after thansgiving) I saw many ads for GPS units. GPS’s have come a long way. These new ones have color touch screens, and have street level maps for the USA built into them. With my older Garmin V, I had to load maps from a CD to the GPS for a region that I would be travelling to. So if I was going to Las Vegas, I would load in several big chunks of southern Nevada, and some of eastern California just in case I decided to go or a long drive. But these new GPS’s have all the maps built in.
But I already had shopping plans for Black Friday, so no new GPS. But a bunch of GPS’s were on sale the day after Christmas. This time I decided I was going to get one. I looked at several models including Garmin, Magellan, and TomTom. I have owned Garmin, and Magellan GPS’s before. But TomTom was a newcomer. I was a little leery. I read reviews of the Magellan unit that was on sale, but it had gotten poor reviews. It sounded like it had been rushed to market, and wasn’t wuite ready. The TomTom One on the otherhand had gotten pretty good reviews. And at $150 it seemed like a great price. Much cheaper than waht my older Garmin V cost.
Circuit City was one of the places that had the TomTom One on sale. On the morning of the sale, I went to their website, and they show one being available for pickup at my local store. Cool! I ordered it. I didn’t plan to pick it up till after work. But a short time later, I got a voice message from someone at Circuit City saying they didn’t have any, and that I could get a refund. I didn’t want a refund, I wanted the GPS I had bought. At lunch time, I stopped at Radio Shack to see if they had any of the TomTom GPS units left. But they were out. Not a surprisre at this point. I was pissed at Circuit City, and was going to insist that honor my purchase. I did afterall have a confirmation that they were hold one for me. I didn’t like the idea that they were going to refund the $150 I paid for the TomTom GPS this week, and then want to charge $250 for the same GPS next week! I stewed about this all day, getting pretty ticked off at Circuit City.
After work I stopped into Circuit City with my paperwork. I was pissed, but was planning on trying to be nice, but insistant, and talk my way up to the regional manager if I had to.
I didn’t mention anything about the phone call. I just presented my paperwork, and acted as if I hadn’t gotten a call. I was going to make THEM explain how they were out to me. But after the guy rung in my car, and I signed and everything he went into the back to retrieve the GPS. I was expecting him to come back and say sorry, there was a mistake. But the guy cam back with a box. They had the TomTom One GPS. I am guessing some other person may not get theirs. Or maybe someone goofed and they just hadn’t found the GPS before. Or maybe a shipment came in. Whatever. I got my TomTom!
I have played with it some. It is different than my Garmin V. Better in most ways. Though there are a few things that my Garmin did better. But I still need to play with the TomTom One a lot more before actually using it for travel. After I really get a chance to try it out, I will write a review.
Having watched Cash And Treasures on the Travel Channel, both my wife and I have wanted to try some of those trips. In March, we are driving down to Virginia where I am going to be running a marathon. But I noticed that North Carolina was the next state down. And I was pretty sure that one of the Cash And Treasures shows had taken place in NC. I search and sure enough, they had been hunting emeralds in Hiddenite, NC. That was less than a 6 hour drive away. Hmmm. And the emerald hunting looked like fun. And coincidently, the Cash And Treasures episode with the emerald hunting was just on during a New Years marathon of the show. So I talked to my wife, and she is all excited. Well, me too. We are planning on taking a couple day drive down to the marathon when I am hopefully going to qualify for the Boston Marathon by running a 3:30 race. We will staying over night there, and then Monday drive down towards Hiddenite. We will stay overnight there, and then on Tuesday actually do the emerald hunting. My legs should be feeling a little bit better by Tuesday. I am sure they will still be a little sore though. If we have fun the first day, maybe we will stay and do a second day before driving back up north.
There was another place down in Georgia with amethyst hunting, but my wife seemed to be happy with just doing the emeralds. And on the show, they seemed to be finding more than just emeralds. Some of the other stones listed on the places website are aquamarine, sapphire, garnet, topaz, amethyst, citrine, rutile, tourmaline and hiddenite.
I am planning on getting the combo permit which will allow us to do digging, creeking and sluicing. I am a strong guy, so the digging wont be that hard. But then the creeking could be fun too.