The plan for Wednesday was to visit the Hansonburg Mining District in Socorro County to collect at yet another of Eddie's claims. We left the campground early that morning and drove about 1-1/2 hours north to Carrizozo where we met up with Eddie. Then, we followed him about 40 minutes west to Bingham and turned south onto a very dusty unpaved road. We climbed a treacherous rocky road where one wrong move would have caused us to lose our truck's exhaust system or worse. We finally made it to a flattened area and adit cut into the side of a steep slope and parked. The view was spectacular.

The entrance to the mine is secured by a welded web of thick steel rebar. Anyone trying to force their way through or around the steel would stand a good chance of getting smashed like a bug beneath a huge rock slab and this might be preferable to being thrown off the mountain by Eddie. But, I'm just sayin'.

The mine, with two drifts forming a "Y", extends about 150 feet into fractured bedded marble. Blue, purple and sometimes green fluorite crystals on a box work of striated bladed barite crystals, with galena and other minerals are prominent on the ceilings, walls and fallen rock inside the mine.

While there were plenty of excellent specimens that could be obtained by cobbing the fallen rock inside the mine, Eddie showed me a spot near the back for which he had been told a fluorite/barite pocket had been covered over. I agreed it might be worth my while to uncover the pocket to see what goodies were hiding beneath all the rubble, especially since he seemed eager to see what was there after years of owning the mine. It took a lot of hard work to squirrel my way down and uncover the spot, but I was as happy as a pig in slop when I started retrieving some cool stuff.

Although I came to find out the pocket had been mostly finished off by the prior rockhound who then decided to bury it when he was done, I managed to liberate some very nice specimens from along its margins and base. After my butt, back and arms were replete with scratches from the sharp fluorite and barite, I banged up a few boulders on my way out and for some more keepers. The following pictures are some of what we recovered in and around the mine.

The last time we visited the mine, we stayed a little too long and ended up having to drive down the hazardous road after the sun set and negotiating it by headlights wasn't fun. So, by about 4:00 PM we stopped collecting, wrapped up and stowed away our finds, bid adieu to Eddie and made it down and back to the highway just as the sun was setting. We drove back to Alamogordo and enjoyed a fine supper on the last evening we spent in New Mexico, as we pulled up stakes and began our journey home a couple hours before sunrise Thursday. We were grateful for our time spent rockhounding in beautiful New Mexico and Arizona and Eddie's friendship and generosity, but glad to be heading back to home sweet home.

It took us three hard days of driving to finally make it home. We stopped along the way at a Tennessee selenite location we had visited a couple times before since it is a relatively short distance off the highway and made for a good break from driving.

Within about an hour, we had recovered more than enough ornate selenite crystals from the top of the sticky wet gray shale.

We pulled into our driveway late-afternoon Saturday and decided that Opal was as happy as we were to be there as we watched her do figure eights on our front lawn - pretty impressive for a 12-year old mutt!

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