The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mining for money
Gemmining could be your full- time job.
Moonstones in Montana, amethyst and emeralds in North Carolina, garnet and quartz in upstate New York. At pay- to- dig mines around the United States, visitors can paw through pi les of mine tailings to uncover crystal sand gemstone son “finders, keepers” terms for as little as $ 10 a day.
At Herkimer Diamond Mines in central New York, home to an especially clear and unusually hard type of quartz crystal known as the Herkimer diamond, a $ 14 admission price includes a day of prospecting and the rental of a rock hammer. ( Children under 4 mine for free.)
In a typical year, one- fifth of the mine's customers are international tourists, so when the coronavirus halted travel and delayed the start of this year's April- toNovember digging season, mine proprietor Renée Scialdo Shevat worried about what the loss in revenue may do to the 40- yearold family business.
By late summer, she was more concerned with how to limit the crowds. Diggers of all ages and degrees of seriousness had begun arriving in droves. “These days, every day is like a Saturday,” Shevat said in early September.
Even before the pandemic sent people searching for road trip destinations and outdoor adventure, interest in prospecting and rockhounding ( or “fossicking,” as it is called in Britain and Australia) was already ticking upward. That has prompted some mines that had long been closed, like the Ruggles Mine in Grafton, NewHampshire, toward new life.
From 1963 to 2016, Ruggles hosted tourists and hobbyists seeking mica, aquamarine, rose quartz and other treasures in its underground chutes and caverns. ( It closed in 2016when its owner, then 90, retired.) Late last year, New York City developers snatched it up with plans to reopen it as a tourist attraction, with major upgrades.
Mine owners aren't the only ones with bright prospects. Some entrepreneurs are finding ways to carve out new careers in gemstones, too.
For example, after having their jobs and schooling upended by the pandemic inthe spring, Frank and Kyndall Stallings, 22 and 27,
of Charleston, Missouri, pivoted to digging for crystals.
“It all started in February, when Frank took me to the diamond mine in Arkansas for Valentine's Day,” Kyndall Stallings said of the couple's visit to a $ 10- a- day public mine called Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro.
While they didn't bring home a diamond, they did find a tiny piece of quartz. The experience wasa thrill of life- changing proportions. By mid- March, Frank Stallings' work as a financial adviser had slowed significantly, Kyndall Stallings' classes for a bachelor's degree in horticulture had gone remote, anda job she had recently been offered— data entry at a hospital — never started.
With their newfound time, the Stallingses were mining nearly every day.
By mid- April, the couple had sold everything they owned on Facebook, burned everything they couldn't sell in a bonfire, packed up their truck and hit the road to work as freelance crystal miners.
“Fifty dollars a day to dig, and if you dig really hard you find $2,000, $ 3,000, $ 5,000worth of crystals,” Frank Stallings said, referring to Ron Coleman Mining, a crystal mine in Arkansas where the couple recently unearthed a “once in a lifetime” 15- pound clear quartz point, which they later sold for