Dig for Underground Diamonds
Rock and Gem Magazine June 1995
Pennsylvania's Crystal Point Diamond Mine is Loaded with Sensational Quartz Specimens.
The man with the battered pickup truck finished filling up his gas tank and we peered in a window of our car. We were poring over the Pennsylvania road atlas and his question startled us "Come to see the flood, huh?"
Quick thinking saved the day. "Yeah, its some flood" He was the third person that day to ask. And not the last.
Actually, we were in north-central Pennsylvania, researching our new book Gem trails of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We arrived, true to form, on the same day as a tropical storm Beryl. Loyalsock Creek was running so high that the trip into Williamsport from our friends' house meant plowing through it on the road. Local people with cameras lined the banks of the Susquehanna River and Lycoming Creek like tourists, capturing photographic mementos of the floods of 94. It really was some flood, but we were not looking for beryl on this trip, stormy or otherwise.
We were there to find quartz crystals at the Crystal Point Diamond Mine. To do that, we first had to find Ray Smith, owner of the mine and of Raytowne. Raytowne is a recently converted brick factory-warehouse, which now houses a country dance club, restaurant and shops. The bearded owner was on the lookout for us when we arrived. Smith characterizes himself as an outdoorsman and an environmentalist, and it is easy to believe it when you see the naturally designed patio at Raytowne, complete with stream, water wheel and plantings.
Smith said he was never interested in rocks until he found large quartz crystals on his 200-acre site in the mountains. That's difficult to believe. Ray Smith appears to be one of those individuals who is interested in everything. Our conversations ranged from fossil collecting to his skills at chipping an arrowhead., to hunting expeditions. And of course we talked quartz. After a cup of coffee in Raytowne, we were off to the mine. The land that Smith now owns is part of an area where he hunted while growing up. He first saw quartz crystals taken from the creek below the mine's location about 45 years ago. The landowner built the crystals into his fireplace. After Smith purchased the land, he started to find crystals on a heavily used deer trail. Ever curious, he started digging and found the quartz vein.
For the first three years, it was all manual digging. Smith said he worked hard on the side of the hill a couple of years, but "I'm not a mountain goat - so I dug down from the top." The fourth year he got a backhoe and now he has a front end loader. The advantage of the front end loader is that he can dig along the side of the vein without breaking much. He has removed tons of loose crystal clusters weighing up to 130 lbs. And many aggregates of 50 to 60 lbs. He has seen pieces that probably weigh a ton or two. With possibilities like that, you can see why he does not want to break much. By now, we couldn't wait to see the mine, or walk the trench filled with treasures. We followed Ray's truck out of town and up the mountain roads in our little car as far as we could, then parked and hitched a ride in Ray's 4 wheel drive truck. The last leg of the trip is down a rough jeep trail. Beryl was still with us ultimately bringing rain in buckets and in drizzles all the way to the mine. The Crystal Point Diamond Mine is really a long cut dug into the Bald Eagle Mountain. Smith impressed us with the consideration he has given the land and he endeavors to maintain his mining area as ecologically sound as possible so that it can be reclaimed when mining ends.
The rain tapered off when we got to the mine as if Beryl wanted to watch us struggle with its muddy effects. The steep walls of the trench proved difficult to navigate at first because of the mud. A good side effect though was the washing the quartz crystals received. Everything sparkled and we didn't know quite where to begin.
Ray Smith knew. He got out a small garden claw and sat down in the middle of the trench and dug a hole in the muddy red clay. Each scrape of the claw revealed quartz crystals of all sizes. He piled thumb size crystals fist size masses, and clusters bigger than your hand beside the hole. The crystals emerging from the hole were often very fat and impressive. He delicately picked at the sides of the hole trying not to damage hidden specimens. Collectors also need to handle the crystals carefully because of their extremely sharp edges. Smith heaved a toaster sized cluster to the top. Ahhh.. fresh QUARTZ!. We sat and watched his progress for a few minutes, but the urge to explore was too hard to resist. We roamed up and down the trench about 200 yards long and now 60 feet deep. We climbed the sides and wandered up to 50 feet from the edges. The buckets went with us and we constantly found something better to put in them. Even Ray's "Junk" piles were dazzling.
Ray encouraged us to look for less common pieces of strawberry quartz crystals sprinkled with red dots of hematite, and black quartz - the darker smokey quartz. We did find smokey quartz ranging from light to very dark in addition to some fine strawberry quartz crystal clusters and citrine. Radioactivity from the decay of uranium deposits in the area is undoubtedly the cause of the smokey quartz. A light rusty coating stains most of the crystals- soaking the quartz in oxalic acid removes the coating. Oxalic acid is available in most hardware stores.
The vein that Ray Smith uncovered is getting wider and gets deeper. It may go down "2 or 3 miles and that excites me." He said. Back at Raytowne, cold soaked and happy, we weighed our buckets and took a tour of Ray's offices and a room full of quartz crystal. This is where we got to hear about Ray the inventor, Ray the entrepreneur, Jack of all trades. Smith has a patent on leak detection and control systems in the Trans Alaska pipelines and has invented a device to recover oil spills from water. Still, he would rather be on his mountain running the front end loader to uncover more of the vein or sitting in a shallow hole mud soaked and pulling up clusters of quartz crystals.
If you want a guarantee of good finds of quartz crystals, then arrange a visit to Crystal point diamond mine. The diggings are open for collecting from May 1, - October.