Miller Mountain Mine in September 2010

Jimmy Ericson and I drove over to Miller Mountain Coleman Mine on Saturday morning, arriving about 9 am and found there were already about fifteen people digging thru the piles of new dirt and some on top walking around searching for yard rocks. We paid our ten dollar dig fee and then Jimmy drove on up and got started, while I visited with Faith and Bill, the Caretakers for the mine, who had asked me to bring some druse quartz down the next time I was there, so I brought a few pieces down to look at. They decided they liked a couple of the boytroidal ones and we did a little trading. I decided I would do my digging first and then trade afterward.

I drove on up and found Jimmy settled into a pile of dirt….

…so I got my boots on and changed to a shirt already clay stained, didn`t want to get my last good fire department shirt stained…and grabbed my bags and my extendable digging rake. I was invited by a couple of ladies to join them at their dirt pile two up from Jimmy, and one of them showed me some killer clusters she had found already. I hadn`t dug in more than two minutes before I found a beautiful small cluster and then several single points, so I figured this was going to be a nice pile of dirt. There was a lady digging behind me that had found a large point that was every bit of six inches wide and maybe seven or eight inches long, most everything was being found in the large clumps of dark red clay. Here is a photo of the small cluster I found, all cleaned up….

We kept on digging, Jimmy was finding several smaller crystals down at his pile and I was finding a few singles and a lot of smaller clusters, but nothing very big….the lady that had invited me to dig at her pile, was from Arkadelphia, about thirty miles south of Hot Springs and has a rock shop there…about an hour after we sat down, she pulled out a nice plate of black quartz crytals….mouthwatering to say the least…when she got up to go walk the top of the pile a few minutes later, I drifted over toward her side and started digging deeper…within a few minutes of doing so, I pulled out what appeared to be a softball sized cluster that seemed to contain two large points…I could see the tops of the points and a couple of smaller points down the side of it, so I was thinking I had a five crystal point cluster. I decided to take it down and wash it off….something I have never done when there, ever….but this one felt good and I wanted to see what I had….I really don`t think I have a good photo of it yet…but here is what I have so far….

…cleaned up of course…it was quite pretty there too though….and as I walked back toward the pile, everyone along the way wanted to see it so I stopped and showed them what it looked like dirty and then on the way back, cleaned up….I would call it the find of the day for me….I filled four bags of potential crystals, there was so much clay on most of them, when I felt or saw points, I just stuck them in the bag…while not all of them were keepers, quite a few were and I waited til I got home to clean them.

After four hours of digging, I decided to get up and walk around on top and see what I could find…I had seen a guy walking back and forth to his truck from up above with big yard rocks in his hands, so I didn`t really think I would be finding any good sized ones but thought I would just see what I could find surface collecting. I didn`t get very far up the way until I saw a couple of points sticking out of the dirt winking at me and pulled out a few nice smaller clusters…in the bag they went and I kept walking…up on top I found several small singles and gave them to a couple of kids with young families…one family from Nacodoges, Texas, who were there for the weekend and sat and talked with them a bit…they had come up for the weekend to escape the Texas heat and found the heat in Arkansas to be much the same…as well as drought conditions…told them about our dig at Bear Mountain the day before and they decided they just might go there the next morning on their way home and check it out.

Here are a few of the crystals I found while walking around, shown dirty first…

…I didnt carry my camera around with me that day or I would have shown them to you in a step by step format….this one shows a nice single crystal that I found sticking out of the pile….

…and here are some of the other crystals I found…

Sometimes you never know what you have til you get home and start cleaning it up….you start out with a glob of clay…….and then as you are washing it off, out come two points, one on each side…looks promising, so you continue washing, even brushing, and then oila !