For the past ten years, I have joined with a small group of rockhound friends from all over the country and performed a machine dig at the Eureka Fluorite Mine in western Kentucky…for a couple of reasons. Our main goal has always been to help the folks at the BE Clement Mineral Museum, by digging out the old mine pit, which provides safe digging opportunities for rockhounds  of all ages for the remainder of the warm season. By doing so, we remove alot of heavy silt and mud from many of the digging areas, mud that would require hours of hand digging to remove to even get close to the crystals…believe me, we have been there and have done the hand digging ourselves in the first couple of years before we even found out we could use a machine to remove it…we literally wore ourselves out but the rewards were well worth the efforts, too. There are some that would criticize us for what we did, call us opportunists and other things, and yet, given the chance, they would have done the same thing albeit for different reasons than ours.

It is becoming increasingly difficult each year to find places to go and collect rocks and minerals, a passion of mine since I was about eight years old, a passion shared by thousands of people worldwide. The folks who operate the mineral museum at Marion, Kentucky, share that same passion and have opened their hearts to thousands of rockhounds for the past ten years, sharing the passion as well as their making several old mines available to dig into to find buried treasures. Many of the mines in this area of western Kentucky date back to the 1800`s and early 1900`s and were originally operated and mined for zinc and silver, then fluorite later on. The Eureka Mine has always been known for beautiful deep purple and yellow fluorite cubes, occasionally a rockhound will find small lead cubes and sphalerite attached to them as well as smithsonite in a beach sand color, and we have found pockets of greenockite as well. Several years ago, the board members of the Clement Mineral Museum decided to make some of the old mines in the area, available to rockhounds on certain dates each year…that expanded to one public dig per month from April to October and an annual gem show and dig the first weekend of June. Their efforts paid off and thousands of rockhounds in the past ten to fifteen years have greatly benefitted from it…it has become one of my favorite places to visit a few times a year. My group normally performs a machine dig early in the springtime, however this year we were not able to locate a trackhoe operator that was available to work with, so we had to wait until one became available, and that was last weekend. The board of directors had performed some exploratory digging in early April one day and I was invited by Bill Frazer to come down and scout it out soon after.

I drove down the day before their first scheduled open dig in April, leaving work on Friday morning at sunrise….

….and boy what a beautiful sunrise it was…..

 

….arriving in Marion by noon. After visiting with Tina and Sherry at the museum, and taking them some goodies to sell in their museum gift shop to further help them in their efforts, I went with Bill out to the mine to see what they had already dug out…finding that Bill had dug into the older pit area on the south side and over to the old logging road. They had made an exploratory trench cut in October of 2014 and a large vug of beautiful fluorite plates were discovered in the bottom of that cut at the very back wall of it….

…..so this dig expanded upon that effort to locate even more purple, as Bill stated to me. He had the operator stop digging as soon as they started seeing purple….here is how it looked when I scouted it in early April….

…and found some pockets of purple fluorite all over the place in the new pit area, most of it centered around this bench left in the middle….

…none of that was really spectacular looking, but did indicate that there was some good stuff to be found in that general area, it was down at the vein or fault level, which is where we have found it in years past. There were also several old bottles found during this dig in October, like this snuff bottle I located in the tailing piles…

…and on up the old logging road that runs along the mine, Bill had some exploratory digging done, looking for the fault that runs alongside the logging road, as indicated on the old maps…..

….and where I found a small plate of nice cubes that morning….

…there were some other cubes laying around in that same area, again giving me good indicators that more could be found there. I walked back down to the new pit area….

 

…and climbed down into the pit area to do some looking around…finding a few pockets of cubes and digging out a couple of basketball sized chunks with some cubes on them as well….

…I decided to stick around and see if I could help the rockhounds the next morning at the open dig. I arrived at the museum about 8 am and visited with Tina again, who told me that Bill was tied up with some work and asked if I could provide the group with a safety talk and then lead them out to the mine…we stepped outside and I gave them some history on the mine and then they followed me through town and out to the mine. After I pointed out some good areas to check out, based on what I had observed the day before, they scattered out and began digging….

…and this group went up the road to the other spot where I found the plate of cubes the day before….

 

….I was up there when a gal pulled out a huge plate of cubes after digging down two feet into the pile to liberate it….let me tell you she went home one happy camper….I walked back down to the new pit area and found this group on break…

I left there about 1 pm that day and headed home and heard later in the week from Tina that they had found some nice stuff after I left…the young couple in the photo above were sitting in a prime spot and should have pulled out some nice plates. The couple across in front of them, were from the St Louis area, not far from where I work even, and the guy by the green bucket is from Effingham and on the volunteer fire department there…there was a family from Ohio that liked to go flint hunting too.