Last weekend, I invited Mike and Chris Streeter to come down to Lake Chatuge to collect limonite after pyrite pseudomorphs with me.

Shortly after I moved from Atlanta to Hiawassee, a rockhound friend from Tennessee emailed me to tell me that he had heard, through the grapevine, that I had moved into one of his favorite collecting locations - Lake Chatuge. He mentioned going to several locations around the lake that I was already familiar with, but he also spoke about one that I had not heard of - Jack Rabbit Park. He told me about finding corundum (#9 - for Wayne) in a large boulder on the shoreline near the camping area and also about a distant limonite location along the lake some distance from the park. He has been going to these locations for more years than he could remember. I have only been to the limonite location a couple times since learning about it from my friend, but only when the lake was down during the winter months.

             

Last Saturday was a pretty cold day with temps down in the 30's. The brisk walk out to the collecting area gave all of us time to warm up and get the circulation moving. As we approached the rock outcrops, I noticed that parts of the shoreline was covered with patches of elongated clear to milky crystals. Maybe these xtls. were exposed when the Corps of Engineers reduced level of the lake??? WHAT COULD THEY BE???

We finally arrived at the limonite exposure just as the skies were clearing and the sun was warming us (too bad for those milky white xtls!) The collecting area seems to run along the shoreline for several hundred yards, wherever rocks are weathering out of the banks of the lake.