2004/04 Boston and South Carolina trip - Herkimer |
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After saying our goodbyes we were off down the Queen Elizabeth Highway, bypassed Niagara, and were back into the USA, this time in New York State. The turnpike isn’t the most interesting drive, but it’s fast with lots of rest areas for resting and eating. America’s east coast has rest areas much like those on English motorways where you have the opportunity to spend lots of money on awful food. Quite a few people looked at us cooking lunch on the tailgate of the truck and said “Hey that’s the way to go!”, but we never saw anyone else doing it.
We were headed to the Herkimer area of New York State to go mining for Herkimer diamonds. They aren’t really diamonds of course, but pieces of quartz that have formed in a perfect double-ended crystalline shape looking like cut diamonds, already faceted by nature.
Our destination was the Treasure Mountain diamond mine that I’d found on the Internet. When we got there the signs said “Open 365 days a year” and also “Sorry closed”. So 
we headed to my second choice, a KOA campsite, which turned out to be ideal. Luckily, it was their opening day for the season, and we were able to camp there on the bank of West Canada creek. Across the road was an enormous rock shop and museum, leading to the entrance to their mine. We planned to be there first thing in the morning.
Friday 16th April
We had a surprisingly cold night, with our washing up bowl frozen solid in the morning. We rented hammers and bought a chisel at the rock shop and headed down into the quarry.
This was “hard rock” mining. The crystals form in gaps in the rock 
called vugs, and they have to be liberated by chiseling the rocks out of the quarry wall or by splitting the rocks that are already out and down. Sandie developed blisters wielding her hammer, so she just walked around looking for crystals that others had dropped and found much more good stuff than I did. I wielded hammer and chisel for a couple of hours and opened a number of vugs but only found crystals that were either milky or too small to be interesting.