by Dion Stewart
Ironic as it seems with the State Mineral for Georgia being “Staurolite,” we traveled to North Carolina to collect hundreds of nice specimens between the 20 some individuals who participated in our October 22nd field trip. The Gem and Mineral Society of Franklin, NC, and the Georgia Mineral Society joined us, and we collected on three sites.
The main site was loose dirt where the staurolite had weathered out of the underlying bedrock to produce thousands of 1/2″ to one inch crosses in the soil. We simply placed several shovel-fulls in a screen and a little shaking was all that was needed to separate the soil from the crystals. The owner of the land charged a minimal fee, but would limit you to one five gallon bucket full of staurolite crystals from that soil pile. A limit was really unnecessary as most people had over a hundred specimens by the time the bucket was only a quarter full.
The second more pristine site was further up on the hillside, where you could pull back the fall leaf cover and find larger (1″ to 1 1/2″) crosses just lying in the surface dirt. About half a dozen individuals wanted to find the staurolite crosses still in the bedrock, so we hiked several yards up to a different level where we collected a beautiful schist made of fine grained muscovite, tiny soccer-ball shaped garnets, surrounding long staurolite crosses. Most of the crosses that we found were a typical “X” shape, but there were two exceptional crosses.
Ken found a 2″ Roman Cross in the soil pile, and I found a 1 1/2″ Maltese Cross still imbedded in the schist. Since the day was a beautiful cloudless, sunny day with temperature right around 70-degrees, we had individuals who stayed to the very last minute of the allotted time, enjoying the day, the beautiful country side, and perhaps most importantly they enjoyed each others company.
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