Hard Rock Mining

Day 140: By special request: rocks and a rockhounding story.

In 1972, a deposit of amethyst quartz was discovered by a farmer near Big Lake, Washington (Walker Valley, Skagit County). A few years later, my husband and I became aware of the site through a friend who ran a lapidary shop. Avid rockhounds that we were, we made several field trips, Bruce keen on finding some faceting-grade crystals while I was more interested in collecting mineral specimens for display. Although Bruce's hopes for flawless material were never realized, we did gather both clear quartz and amethyst, and also some nice calcites (the yellowish "roses"), but the "digging" was not easy. The crystal vugs were set in a very dense basalt and had to be sledgehammered and pried apart with long crowbars.

The specimens shown here all came from one of our most successful digs. It was also the most physically demanding, and blisters, nicks and slices from sharp rock edges were par for the course despite whatever protective gear we wore. During the brutal excavation of the amethyst, a fragment of basalt embedded itself in the edge of my lower lip. I didn't notice it until a few days later, and then assumed that it was just a scab. By the time I realized it was a piece of rock, it had healed over, leaving a little spot like a blackhead which I could not squeeze out. Six months or so went by, and although it didn't cause me any particular discomfort, it bothered me that it was there.

I'm not particularly squeamish unless the blood I'm seeing is my own, so when I decided to do a job of home surgery to remove the chip, I laid out my tools (Exacto knife, tweezers and a needle) on the bathroom sink and closed the lid on the throne in case I started to pass out. It was a good precaution to take, because I got light-headed several times before extracting a tiny sliver of black basalt sharp as a splinter from a razor blade's edge half an hour later.

Walker Valley is now only open to permittees (yeah, another permit), and I understand it still yields some nice specimens of amethyst and clear quartz, but I'm content with those I dug forty years ago. I still collect rocks, but only those I can easily pick up off the ground.