Little Pine Garnet Mine - Madison County

Little Pine Garnet Mine
A McRocks Cookout & Rockswap Field Trip
Madison, North Carolina
July 6, 2006
Report by Mike Streeter
(mcstreeter@charter.net)

As part of the McRocks cookout and rock swap festivities, I led a group to the Little Pine Garnet Mine in Madison County, NC. We met at Davis Grocery where we signed in and paid the $10 per person fee to collect.

Davis Grocery
(photo by Jeff Deere)

We caravaned several miles from the station to the Little Pine Mine where we spent the day hunting garnets. Some chose to collect outside in the spoil piles, while several in the group, ventured into the mine to extract garnets from its walls. But, no matter inside or out, lots of garnets were recovered by all.

Jeff Deere, Don Henderson, Bruce Skubon and I spent part of the day collecting inside the mine. Recovering large matrix specimens from there is a difficult task since the chlorite schist always seems to want to split and break up in all the wrong ways. Despite this, I was fortunate to be able to liberate the following 27-pound matrix specimen with garnets up to 4-inches long.

Click on each specimen picture to enlarge

Thanks to Don Henderson and Jeff Deere with the Rome, Georgia club for helping me to recover my best ever personally-collected matrix specimen!

Don Henderson
& Mike Streeter
(photo by Jeff Deere)

At home with Don and I
showing off the big matrix
specimen to Chrissy Streeter
and Herb Bastuscheck
(photo by Jeff Deere)

Everyone who came out to the Little Pine had a great time and the many garnet and schist filled buckets were icing on the cake.

CLICK THE LITTLE MINER TO RETURN TO THE FIELD TRIP PAGE