Drove down to Marion,  Kentucky last weekend for a couple of days to join some rockhound friends from Michigan, North Carolina, and Georgia, and we dug into the Eureka Mine for our second exploratory dig in as many years. We always like to do this before a group dig so we have a better idea of what can be found by the group before we get there. This year we were lucky enough to schedule this dig one week ahead of the group dig, and fortunate to get some pretty good weather as well.

We arrived at the mine Saturday morning and found the pit pretty much the way we remembered leaving it the spring season before…and as soon as Wayne arrived and readied his equipment, he began to dig the pit wider for us again…..this guy really knows what he is doing.  We were his second group to work closely with, and before working with us last year, he had never worked with a group before…it looked like we had worked together as a well oiled machine for years, it was that smooth last year and again this year.

This year we decided to place certain buckets of dirt and material into a specific located pile or two so that future rockhounds would know where to go to look for great material and then had Wayne place the overburden and waste into the old pit area and form a small intervening dam as well between the two pits.

And then we found the vein again….

and within a few minutes it started looking even more promising…

We then had Wayne set to widen out the area and discovered the vein moving over to the right and widening out on us, had no idea it went that wide, but turned out about twenty feet wide. We then extended the new pit to about thirty feet long and that gave us a good area to search out specimens, especially knowing we had a large group coming in the following weekend.

After about four hours of digging, we turned Wayne loose for the weekend and we set about digging with hand tools at both ends and along the sides of the vein to see how much purple we could find.

We found both large sizes and smaller cubes along the top of the vein and within pockets of the vein…

Bill and Jeff even found a pocket lined with calcite druse on the fluorite cubes.

We found some palm sized pieces and medium sized pieces of fluorite cubes with some unusual green and yellow balls of what was figured to be greenockite on them…we have never found or seen anything like that come out of the Eureka Mine before, nor heard of it either.

 

We dug down to about twelve to fifteen feet in most cases, the water table is pretty high at this mine, you`ll hit it about those depths and a pump is crucial to keep digging without any problems. Luckily the Clement Museum folks have a nice pump available to rent for just such digs, and this makes it much easier to keep on digging by hand. In years prior, we had to have one guy devoted to bailing water with a five gallon bucket to stay ahead of things.

We hand carried the finds to the top of the pit to Phil….

and he hands them off to Ernie,  another rockhound, who brought a clean water pump and generator, enabling us to pump from Hurricane Creek next to the pit, and use a spray nozzle to clean off mud from the specimens we recovered from the vein.

Then the cleaned specimens are placed on newspaper or a tarp, to dry off in the sun, for choosing later on.

At the end of the day, once everyone wears down and out and tires of digging, we select straws and choose what specimens we want to take home with us. This year we had some nice specimens to choose from and after everyone had made their selections, we placed several up in the three piles for others to find and take home if they wanted. We spent our first day in nice warm sunshine, the temps about 75 degrees and then on Sunday, it rained most of the day, a light rain this year, and we stopped early afternoon.

All in all though, it was another good exploratory dig and some nice stuff was found and placed in the tailing piles we created new this year as well. Ernie was walking by one of the piles Sunday and spotted a chunk sticking out of the mud with some nice two inch cubes all over the top of it, further evidence that there were some nice pieces in the piles dug up from the pit. I`ll leave you with a few more pics of what we found this year.