Mining for Emeralds

This month, I traveled to the Emerald Hollow Mine in Hiddenite, North Carolina, to try my hand at digging for emeralds. This is the mine where a 65-carat emerald was found in 2003.  Called the “Carolina Emerald,” it is now part of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s collection.

The weather was clear, warm, and pleasant. I arrived in the early afternoon and had to park in the overflow area since the mine had drawn so many families and others, also seeking to find an emerald.

The brochure says that garnets, sapphires, tourmalines, aquamarine, and other gems can also be found there.

I paid the $27 admission fee and was given choices. I could sit at the covered sluiceway and wash through buckets of mine ore (dirt) to find precious minerals. I could take the trowel and sieve provided down to the creek and sift through the loose sand and gravel in the creek bed. I could search through the rocks, boulders, and dirt for gemstones. Or I could choose a combination of those.

I asked the attendant what might be the most successful, and he suggested panning in the creek. I donned my wading shoes, picked up a trowel and sieve and entered the stream. I panned for a couple of hours, picked out a few pebbles that seemed to have color, and decided I’d done enough for the experience. Tips: Be careful—the creek bed is slippery. Bring a stool to sit on in the water. This is backbreaking work.

I was pleased with the experience, even though they told me that the crystal structure I thought might be a pale emerald was actually stained quartz. This is an active mine. I suspect that the dirt in the buckets was from the tailings. You could buy “enriched” buckets seeded with a gemstone or two, but on the whole I thought visitors to the site received a  legitimate experience.

They offered a film on panning to view first, and a lapidary was on site. Sadly, I didn’t need the lapidary.