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Thrill of the hunt
Rockhound Emma Kachel, a repeat visitor from Atlanta, celebrated her birthday by digging in the dirt of Diamond Hill Mine with friends. “If this is what I want to do on my birthday, it must be good.”
Photo by Keith Phillips
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Pay dirt
Rockhound Emma Kachel displays a piece of quartz unearthed at Diamond Hill Mine.
Photo by Keith Phillips
To the untrained eye, the Diamond Hill Mine outside of Abbeville just looks like any big old mud pit. A place a wooly mammoth or an elephant might wallow, if such creatures existed in these parts. To get to the treasure, you must, as they say, dig deeper.
“The previous owner had a letter someone had given him, and a lady mentioned how much fun she had finding crystals at Diamond Hill Mine. This was back around 1865,” says the current owner, Gina Clary. “At that point, it was a hill, and the hill would sparkle when it rained, so that’s how it got its name. A lot of people have misconceptions about that and expect to find diamonds.”
What the rockhounds—the thousands of people who come to Diamond Hill Mine each year toting pickaxes, spritzer bottles, wash basins, trowels and five-gallon buckets—are after, though, are the specimens of crystals that form in veins of an intrusive igneous rock called pegmatite. Twice a year, the mine uses a Kubota excavator to churn up new batches of crystals, but unlike tourist traps in the mountains, Diamond Hill Mine is “unsalted.” Everything you find is native to the site.
“A lot of people really enjoy rockhounding at Diamond Hill because it’s relatively easy to find good crystals,” Clary says. “The way our veins run, it’s easier for beginners to get good crystals.”
I arrive at Diamond Hill Mine on a mid-July Monday with the temperature approaching three digits, but heat doesn’t deter the 30 or more rockhounds fanning out over the hills like prospectors of yore. On the advice of a rockhounding friend, I carry with me a small, three-pronged hand cultivator, an army shovel and a bucket.
Everyone is super friendly, but they dispense various and conflicting bits of digging wisdom. Some say you have to move around. Others say that, once you find a cluster, you have to commit to it. Some say to dig in places not turned over. Others say you need to find the pits where it’s clear others have been digging.
I pick a shady spot on the back side of a hill, where I find that the hardest part is knowing at first whether you have a rock or just a hard clod of red clay. All day, I let clunk inside my bucket whatever rocks I find. Part of the fun of rockhounding, everyone says, is not always knowing exactly what you have until you get home and clean the crystals.
I let my rocks soak overnight in Bar Keepers Friend and water, and I polish them off in the morning with a toothbrush. To my relatively untrained eye, I have some gorgeous specimens. Nothing, perhaps, to sell, but enough to remind me of Gina Clary’s advice on rockhounding.
“When it’s a good day out, and you’re away from everything, it’s great therapy because you get in your zone of digging,” she says. “Everything else just fades away.”
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Get There
Diamond Hill Mine is located at 100 Diamond Mine Road outside of Abbeville.
Hours: Open every day from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Admission: It costs $20 per person to dig, and you get to keep all crystals that you find.
Tips: Recommended digging gear includes snacks and plenty of water, sunscreen, a long screwdriver for locating and digging around crystals, shovels, pronged garden cultivators, buckets and spritzer bottles or screened wash basins.
Details: Owner Gina Clary can be reached at (864) 934-3744. For more details, visit diamondhillmine.com.