2005/04 Deep South trip - Wegener Phantom mine |
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Thursday April 14th
There are a number of mines in the Mount Ida area that offer opportunities to dig for crystals, but the Wegener Phantom 
crystal mine was just up the road, and that’s where we opted to go. It’s an active mine, selling quartz crystals wholesale to the gem shops, but they also have an area back in the hills where they dump the tailings from the mine. We paid them for permission to dig through the tailings, and drove out there to find this enormous heap of red dirt. The bird in the picture is a roadrunner we met on the access road, like you see in the Wiley Coyote cartoons.
No one else was there, even though it was a gorgeous day, blue sky, mid-70s, and a light breeze. I dug a trench across 
the heap, and dumped bowlfuls of dirt onto the screens for Sandie to sort through. She was looking for clear crystals that she could facet and also for phantoms. “Phantom” crystals have someembedded manganese, dark crystal that makes it look as if there’s a shadow of another crystal inside. However, the crystals are also stained with iron from the dirt, so we’ll have to wash them with oxalic acid when we get home to see what we’ve got.
Their warehouse had some amazing crystals, individuals a couple of feet high, and enormous mountainous masses with hundreds of crystals.