Hey Gang,

We had a terrific time a Diamond Hill near Antreville, SC last weekend. Diamond Hill is best known for amethyst and smokey quartz but also produces some excellent skeletal quartz. There was barely a cloud in the sky and temperature reached a comfortable 73 degrees.

  
Diamond Hill Quartz Mine

We performed some hard core digging in large quartz veins for skeletal quartz clusters. Chrissy and Opal staked out their claim and did their best to keep me from taking over their hole when they found something good;~}

    
Opal and Chrissy (left)
Opal looking for trouble (right)

Opal spent some of her time keeping guard to make sure that no squirrel or possum attacked me while I was digging in my hole.

Mike and Opal

We found a bunch of skeletal quartz plates in every size, as you can see in the following picture taken in our driveway.

skeletal quartz plates

Most of the crystals are covered with a thin coating of brownish red to yellowish iron oxide giving the crystals a particuarly striking appearance. Usually, I use oxalic acid to remove iron oxide staining but the staining of these skeletal crystals only enhances their beauty.

    

click on each specimen picture to enlarge

    

The most striking specimen is one that contained pure white crystals partially covered with brown and yellow iron oxide and what appears to be black manganese oxide. We recovered this specimen from large clay pocket. The crystals were sticking straight down and could not be seen until I pried loose and carefuly turned over a very large quartz boulder (I had as much as taken over Chrissy's spot at this point).

    

click on each specimen picture to enlarge

    

The following and last specimen was recovered from the same pocket as the one above.

    

click on each specimen picture to enlarge

We left Diamond Hill with what we thought were plenty of excellent specimens but we wouldn't know for sure until we got home and cleaned off all the red clay the next day. The specimens were all coated in such thick layer of clay that washing them with the garden hose was like collecting all over again - we did good after all!

KOR

Mike

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