I'm so glad she did! We had so much fun at Emerald Hollow Mine. For $5 each, we each got a seat at the sluice table and we also got a big bucket of dirt from the mine that was included in the admission price. Now, I don't know if the buckets were "enhanced" or not, but we found all sorts of pretty rocks. And not teeny, tiny ones either.
I have NO idea why I didn't dress the kids in the "old" clothes that I had bought for them when we were digging for diamonds. What was I thinking? We got plenty dirty, and this red dirt really doesn't wash out. Cheap souvenier, I guess. Ask Tyler sometime about the red dirt that he brought home from vacation as a kid. ;)
Anyway, sluicing was easy. The kids would use a provided hand shovel to scoop some dirt into their screening box.
Then, they'd set their screen into the stream of water and wash the dirt away with their hands and the provided scrub brushes.
Then, following sluicing ettiquite, they'd lift their screens on an angle to see what was left. Even Matthew did some sluicing. He had a lot of fun getting the dirt, washing it, and pulling out the pretty rocks.
Becky's "I'm supposed to smile but I'm really sick of your camera" smile.
The kids really had a great time since they were actually finding stuff this time.
Clockwise from bottom left: Quartz, Rose Quartz, Smokey Quartz
Clockwise from bottom left, with a penny for scale: Green Aventurine, Blue Aventurine, 6 small Garnets, Ruby, Emerald, Sapphire. The small stones on the far right are all Sapphires.
Clockwise from left: Amythest, Mica, and something else. Not sure what it is but the rocks are pretty shades of brown. The Mica crumbles into sparkly flakes, and the dirt at this place in Hiddenite is all glittery with crumbled Mica. It's very pretty in the sunlight.
These are all sapphires. We had run out of our free dirt (ha ha) so we bought 2 more buckets. The man who sold them to us told me not to toss anything at all aside since some of these things really just look like rocks and nothing else. So I kept everything in my screen and when the man came around again he picked all of these out as sapphires. I did some research and he is right, but these rocks are obviously not gem-cutting grade. It would be neat to polish them somehow, although I read that tumbling them isn't going to be the best way of doing it.
The young man who was helping us was very nice. He tossed the following rocks into our screen and said, "Look, you found a Ruby and an Emerald, too!" I think he got a kick out of how excited the kids were about the whole thing. So this one is a Ruby.
And this one is an Emerald.
This is a sapphire with a tiny chip out of the exterior surface. You might be able to see that what is inside is shiny.
No comments:
Post a Comment