West Carolina Sapphires on Monday

Monday morning we trekked up to the hills of west Carolina in search of some corundrum, specifically saphires and maybe a ruby if extremely lucky.  Having researched potential mines carefully, we concluded that there are two types of "public mines" in North Carolina: elaborate crafted "mine experiences" and genuine gem producing locales that provide a place, real natural material from that place, and a facility to process the material.  With the former you are paying for the lowest quality South American gemstones around, plus a fee to cover the cost of the "mine" building an attraction and paying workers to lace the ground, a stream, or your buckets of dirt with cheaper gems.  If you like feeding your kids a line of crap, make them believe in the Easter bunny and such, then this is the place to go.  An expectation for an experience is built with advertising and on-site marketing, and fulfillment is delivered quickly and easily.  The latter of the two options for a mine is often an extremely remote hillside, which produces gemstones in reasonable abundance and frequency.  Typically a family owns some earth moving equipment, happen to be rockhounds, has a nice piece of land (with stream nearby), and decides to build a sluice.  A visitor to this type of mine is going to get dirty, pay a little more, may find nothing, but most likely will walk away tired (in a good way) with a bag of gems and a unique true-to-locale experience.

We chose to drive up to the Mason Mine.  I think it's the Mason mine.  There's another mine with a similar name that is as crappy as the one we visited is good.  Regardless, we traveled to the mine by way of many miles on Interstate 40.  We embarked from our quaint extended stay room in checkered Winston-Salem after an early morning gas-up.  It was a rough morning.  An alarm went off for the first time in several days.  The night prior we were up late enjoying North Carolina's fine food and beverage.  The combination of the two resulted in an incessant need for large quantities of cheap southern hotel coffee.  We did manage to hit the road early, and bolt out of Andy Griffith country into the hill country of Appalachia.  One consequence of high coffee intake was regular rest breaks.  That part of North Carolina has nice gas stations.  After several hours of interstate driving we found that the hills got steeper and the road winded around the mountains.  The hillsides were picturesque with the fall colors shining in the lazy southern fall sun.  Apart from the foul smell of paper mill towns we enjoyed what our senses perceived.

The directions to our mine were quite sketchy and assembled from rockhound message boards, some dating back to dial-up BBS days.  Not to knock the good 'ole BBS, I once logged on, but any information communicated via a BBS on dial-up servers has probably been around for at least 5 years.  Every message board we found warned that google and mapquest create routes to the mine that travel over cow paths and nonexistent roads.  We chose to drive to Franklin, and wing it from there.  Just prior to the exit for the highway that leads to Franklin we spotted an information center sign.  We pulled off, and found small information hut tucked into the corner of a small truck stop.  Nothing else could be found, no other businesses or residences.  The exit sat nestled in a little North Carolina valley. 

We were greeted in the information hut by a fine gentleman transplanted from upstate New York.  He traveled down to the mountains of west Carolina via the Blue Ridge Parkway 40 years prior, and never left.  Somehow he knew we were looking for gems, probably because the only thing in town were trees and rocks.  After a brief conversation and assurances that we were on the right path, we embarked into Franklin.  The highway that leads to Mason mine resembles many Maine backroads -- not Maine highways, but backroads.  After 20 minutes of winding up into the mountains, the road started to narrow and fork every few miles.  We faithfully followed small read signs that read "Mine ->".  Cow pastures, log cabins, small stick built houses, and barns lined our path.  Because the grade is so severe, the small homesteads we passed were tucked into the hillsides Alpine-style.  Think Abe Lincoln's cabin in Switzerland, and you're pretty close.  At this point it occurred to me that we'd be travelling back at dusk, and that the signs were small and nailed to trees.  I nervously made mental notes of my surroundings.  After 45 minutes the road turned to dirt, narrowed to a single land, and dead-ended. Alas, our mine! 

The Mason mine consists of a camper, some picnic tables, and a cabin amongst a hickory stand at the bottom of a steep hillside.  Between the cabin and the hillside a small stream runs through.  A dam retains water for a small sluice operation.  In a nutshell: two troughs were constructed alongside the stream.  Water is pumped from the stream into one end, passes through the sluice, and empties into a retaining pond which slowly filters back into the stream.  Sluice-mining is an ardous process -- dirt ("ore") is carried down the hillside 10 gallons at a time, and then processed with a screen in the sluice.  The water washes fine and light material out of the screen, with some human assistance, and a tray of small pebbles remain.  Using a gold panning technique, the pebbles are sorted lightest to heaviest from one end of the screen to the other, and the heavy material is visually inspected for sapphires.

Amey and I were given pointers from the staff on what to look for when selecting ore from the hillside.  Stay away from clay, look for a light brown subsoil.  They also pointed out where in the subsoil sapphires are found, and helped us refine our screening technique.  Very quickly we found our first hexagonal, steely blue sapphires.  The excitement of plucking a gemstone from what is essentially a giant pile of dirt made for a fun afternoon.  Some buckets turned out several nice stones, others turned out to be nothing more than a pile of rocks.  We stayed until the mine closed for the day, and vowed to return.

After we put away our equipment, we stepped into the cabin to chat with our gracious hosts.  It became quickly apparent that the owner/operators had the rock-bug themselves, and were in business to support their own hobby.  They showed us several nice cut stones they had collected over the years, and shared information about another gem found in NC, emeralds.  There are only two reputable emerald mines open to the public in NC, and our new friends recommended the Crabtree mine.  Because emerald mining involves the removal of massive amounts of material in search of veins of the mineral, it is difficult for the recreational gem enthusiast to find native stones on their own.  However, the Crabtree mine charges a modest fee for hobbyists to scour their tailings.  (Tailings are materials cast aside / left over from the mine.)  Because commercial mines move tons of material a day, and are looking for the really big stuff, they often miss some really nice specimens.  One of the men at the Mason mine showed us a shoebox full of rough-cut emeralds he found in a day.  He even cut a few into some massive stones which he mounted onto a ring.  The conversation also turned to Maine's mineral history.  As exotic as rubies are to Maine, tourmaline is to North Carolina.  Our host hoped to someday visit Maine in search of our world-class tourmaline.  He explained that tourmaline is found in Maine because we were farther North and the geology formed minerals under great pressures, creating tourmaline.

The sun began to set, and we hoofed it back to downtown Franklin.  Somehow we were able to guess our way back to the Interstate, and drove into Asheville.  Tired and hungry, we feasted on a homemade chili made by the kitchen of the hotel, and turned in early.  At the end of the day we had an incredible memory and over a dozen sapphires to commemorate it.