Club home | Arkansas Minerals for Beginners

I write these up for the newsletter and put them here too. Where a trip went to a fee mine or private land I don't name the place. The fee mines are glad to have you, and you can find them easily enough, but I'd rather you call them than have them hear from the Internet. The private land stays private, as promised.

Our first trip of the year, at a fee mine in the Ouachitas about an hour west of town. You pay the owner by the day, and he turns you loose on the diggings, with the tailings pile (the leftover dirt and rock from his own digging) open to anyone who'd rather sit than swing a pick. It had rained Thursday and Friday, so the red clay was the consistency of chocolate pudding and about as easy to walk in. Twenty-eight of us came anyway.

Arkansas quartz grows in pockets along veins in the sandstone and shale, and the trick is to find the vein and follow it down, gently, with a small pick and your hands, because the crystals are in there loose in the clay and a shovel will snap them. Brendan Macy found a pocket a little after eleven and spent the next four hours taking it apart a crystal at a time, and came out with a cluster about nine inches long that he says is going to sit on his mantel until he dies. His wife says otherwise.

Eva Holder, who is 83 and has been coming on these trips since 1979, sat on an upturned bucket at the tailings pile with a screwdriver and a coffee can and found thirty-one points before lunch, including one water-clear double-terminated crystal (a point on both ends) that's the best thing anybody found all day. She says the young people waste their energy. She has a point. Our youngest junior, Alfredo, sat next to her and found his first double-terminated point too.

About cleaning quartz: rinse the clay off with a hose first, and let it soak in water for a few days. The rusty iron stain that's left can be removed with an oxalic acid soak, which is how most collectors do it, but oxalic acid is a poison. Use it outdoors, with rubber gloves and safety glasses, in a plastic tub with a lid, where children and pets can't get to it, and follow the directions on the box to the letter. If that makes you nervous, good. Ask a club member to show you the first time.

A smaller group to a novaculite outcrop on a cattle farm south of town, where the owner lets us in every spring as long as we close his gates and bring him a dozen of my wife Jean's fried pies. Novaculite is the white and gray rock the Ouachitas are built on, very hard and very fine-grained, and it breaks with an edge like glass. It's the rock our famous Arkansas whetstones are cut from, and the people who lived here thousands of years ago quarried it for tools and traded it a long way. (More on the minerals page.)

We found good fresh pieces in the creek bed below the ridge, in white, gray, and one beautiful block banded with pink that Kathy Gelinas has claimed for a bookend. Larry Johanson took a slab back to the shop and spent three Tuesday nights grinding and lapping a whetstone out of it, and now sharpens everybody's pocketknife whether they ask or not.

A reminder from that day: if you find a flake or point that looks worked by human hands, leave it where it lies and tell the landowner. It's his, and it's history.

Our biggest trip of the year, as always: forty people, nine of them juniors, and three generations of the Ely family in one station wagon. Crater of Diamonds is the eroded top of an ancient volcanic pipe, and the park keeps a plowed search field of about 37 acres where anybody who pays the entry fee can hunt for diamonds and keep whatever they find. It rained hard Thursday night, which is what you hope for, because rain washes the dirt off the surface and leaves anything heavy and shiny sitting on top where you can see it.

Some of us walked the rows looking for a glint. Most of us dug, hauled buckets of dirt to the washing pavilions, and sifted it through screens in water, then flipped the screen over onto a board to look at the middle, because diamonds are heavy and settle to the center. It's slow, muddy work, and the kids loved every minute of it.

A little before two o'clock, Tracy Keyes flipped her screen, looked, and said a word I won't repeat in front of the juniors. It was a diamond: a little brown one about the size of a match head. The park staff identified and weighed it for her at eleven hundredths of a carat, and wrote it in the book. It's the first diamond a club member has found since Eva Holder's in 1981, which was honey-colored and weighed a quarter carat, and which she wears on a chain to every meeting.

The rest of us came home with jasper, agate, amethyst, quartz, calcite, and sunburns. Chelsea found a piece of amethyst the size of a walnut and has decided she'd rather have it than a diamond anyway, which shows good judgment.

A short, hot one at a second fee mine, which lets clubs go through its tailings piles for a reduced rate. We met at 6:30 to beat the heat and quit at noon, when it hit 92 in the shade and there wasn't any shade. Thirteen of us, and a great many ticks.

Melissa Voight found the best piece of the day, a phantom quartz: a crystal with the faint outline of a smaller, earlier crystal inside it, where the growth stopped for a while and then started again. You can see it when you hold it up to the light. Edith Taylor gave her famous tick-check speech in the parking lot afterward. Do a tick check. Edith is right. Edith is always right about ticks.

Back to the March mine after the summer off, twenty-four strong, on a cool clear morning that felt like a gift. The owner had been digging with his bulldozer in August and had opened a new section of vein, and we were the first club in.

Keith Rickman, our show chairman, took one morning off from worrying about the show and found a cluster of long clear points on a matrix of white quartz that will be the centerpiece of the club case on October 9. Damon Larrabee broke the handle on a brand-new pick on his third swing and then found a fine little cluster with his fingers in the hole the pick made, which I think is a lesson about something. Francis and Deborah worked a pocket together for two hours and split the take down the middle without one argument, which I think is a lesson about something else.

Jean brought fried pies. There were none left by eleven.

Coming up: a quartz dig on Saturday, October 30, and wavellite on a member's family land on Saturday, November 13, limited to fifteen. Sign up at the October 12 meeting. And see you at the show October 9 and 10.