RocKester News Fall 2006

Transcription

1 Upcoming Events and Meeting Chuck Hiler Specimens: September 19 September Meeting: 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Brighton Town Hall, 2300 Elmwood Ave., in the downstairs Community Meeting Room. Meeting will be a Show and Tell of what members have collected and/or acquired this summer. Each person can give a short talk or description about the specimen. For more information call Chuck Hiler at or check the RAS Web site ( for possible updates. October 17 October Meeting: 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Brighton Town Hall, 2300 Elmwood Ave., in the downstairs Community Meeting Room. This month will feature a talk by Mike Hawkens, of the New York State Museum in Albany. His topic is "History of the New York State Museum's Geology Collections. For more information call Chuck Hiler at or check the RAS Web site ( for possible updates. Fluorite - Penfield Calcite with Dolomite Penfield October 28 & 29 Rochester Mineral, Gem, and Fossil Show: To be held in Minett Hall at the Dome Center in Henrietta. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday. Members are requested to sign up to work for at least a one-hour time slot during the show. Help is also needed for the setup on Friday, October 27, beginning at 9:00 a.m., and for the teardown after the show on Sunday. November 21 November Meeting: 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Brighton Town Hall, 2300 Elmwood Ave. Program to be announced. For more information call Chuck Hiler at or check the RAS Web site ( for updates. Selenite & Celestine - Penfield Officers for President Charles Hiler 1st Vice President Robert Hiler 2nd Vice President Secretary Betty Fetter Treasurer Robert Morgan Curator William Pinch Directors Al Mura, Paul Forcella, Paul Dudley Sulfur on Dolomite - Penfield 1

2 President s Message by Chuck Hiler Summer is ending and fall will soon be here. There is still time to do more mineral collecting. I am in the process of setting up a field trip to the Lockport quarry this fall in association with the Buffalo Geological Society. In addition, there will be a weekend field trip to the Walworth Quarry in October for mineral clubs that are members of the Eastern Field Trip Alliance (EFTA). This field trip is called Fluorite Fantasy due to the potential for finding good, clear fluorite crystals in this quarry. Unfortunately, the RAS Mineral Section is not a member of EFTA, so its members are not eligible to go on this field trip. However, if you are a member of one of the other mineral clubs that is in EFTA, you will be able to participate. You must bring proof (your membership card) from the mineral club that is eligible to participate in the EFTA alliance for this dig. Thanks to Cindi and Keith Newman, who are members of both the Rochester Lapidary Society and the Mineral Section, for arranging field trips to collect minerals this summer. Trips were scheduled to visit Herkimer County, the Pierrepont/Canton area in St. Lawrence County, and the Bancroft, Ontario area. The first RAS Mineral Section meeting this fall will be on September 19 th at the Brighton Town Hall in the Community Room at 7:30 PM. Please bring mineral specimens you have collected or acquired over the summer for a show and tell. Be prepared to give a short talk about your specimens. At the October 17 th meeting, Mike Hawkins from the New York State Museum in Albany, will speak on the History of the New York State Museum s Geology Collections. Remember that this year s mineral show in Minett Hall at the Dome Center on Calkins Road will take place on October 28 th and 29 th. We need help from members for both days of the show performing general activities at the show table, ticket collection, and sluice. Help is also needed for set up on the 27 th and teardown on the 29 th. Please check the RAS Bulletin and the Academy Web site for possible updates. Chuck Herkimer Co. Quartz cluster. Specimen ~3 cm (1.25 ) wide Last year s show. Photo courtesy of Lapidary Society s newsletter, The RockCollector 2

3 Herkimer Quartz Collecting by Nancy M. On May 27 th I went to the Crystal Grove Diamond Mine & Campground, St. Johnsville, NY for one day of the weekend field trip set up by Rochester Lapidary Society. Cindi & Keith N. and an RLS couple, who ended up at a different Herkimer Diamond location but reported that they had a good time, were the only other people who participated in this field trip. Crystal Grove is located just off the Thruway near St. Johnsville and is easy to find. The campground seemed nice, but I paid the $7 fee to collect for a day instead of staying overnight. They have two collecting locations where Herkimer quartz crystals can be found. The main one is where I collected, but the smaller pit is supposed to have smoky crystals. Everyone parked right at the edge of the main site where there was a 3-4 foot wall forming one side of the pit. The owner had excavated part of the wall and some people were searching through the rubble looking for loose crystals and breaking open rocks looking for vugs. Other people were working on excavating the wall. Those who worked together in groups using sledgehammers and "steelies" had considerable success at finding large vugs loaded with crystals, some of which were up to 4" long. I didn't have much success working the wall, but found smaller vugs in the loose rock. Unfortunately, many of those vugs were completely filled in or the crystals were shattered. Now that I know more about Crystal Grove, I'd like to go back to excavate the wall with some "steelies" and with a few folks who are good with a sledgehammer! Next time I go I'll also bring sunscreen or a tent canopy with legs that telescope because this pit is right out in the open. This is a good site to collect at if you do as I mention above! Clear Herkimer Co., New York quartz crystals on a cluster of small smoky * crystals. Specimen is ~4 cm. (1.5 ) wide Large crystal cluster. The center crystal has a smoky * center. Specimen is ~12 cm. (4.5 ) wide *Editor s note: Unlike true smoky quartz that is caused by damage to the crystal lattice by natural or artificial radiation, the smoke in Herkimer Co. Quartz is due to inclusions of naturally occurring hydrocarbon. 3

4 Collecting at West Pierrepont, NY by Paul D. On June 24, 2006, Cindi and Keith N. led a collecting trip to West Pierrepont, NY to collect actinolite (or possibly iron-tremolite), tremolite, and a few quartz and uvite tourmaline crystals. Cindi and Keith's daughter, Jessica, Nancy M., Jutta D., and I joined Rochester Lapidary Society president, Hollis H. on the expedition. Following the visit to this locality, we ate dinner in Canton, NY before meeting a company geologist at the dump of an abandoned zinc mine. We collected many interesting specimens of calc-silicate rock comprised largely of serpentine, tremolite, and diopside, as well as a few specimens of pyrite and sphalerite. Later, after Nancy, Jutta, and I left, the others remained at the dump after dark to collect fluorescent minerals. After returning home, I checked some of our finds under UV light and discovered that the feldspar in a piece of pegmatite that Jutta found fluoresces a deep, ruby red under short-wave UV. Although I had never seen or heard of anything like that in feldspar before, the phenomenon reportedly does occur in pegmatites and metamorphic rocks that form under high temperature. Keith busy mining in a pit Nancy inspecting a find Keith, Cindi, Jessica, and Hollis gathered around a digging site Calc-silicate rock as found (Mostly calcite, tremolite, quartz; a minor amount of diopside and other minerals) Actinolite or Iron-tremolite and quartz after dissolving calcite. Area shown ~ 6 cm (2.4 ) wide. Actinolite or Iron-tremolite specimen is ~1.8 cm (0.75 ) wide To see additional pictures taken by photographer Jutta D., go to: 4

5 Bancroft, Ontario Canada Field Trip July 2006 by Cindi N. If you ve been collecting minerals for any length of time, chances are you have heard of the wonderful minerals coming from the Bancroft, Ontario region of Canada. Going via the Thousand Islands Bridge, it took us just over 5 hours of driving time from the I-490/I-90/Rt.96 intersection north of Victor. We had the privilege of spending a weekend collecting there this past July, and it was everything we had hoped for. One of the unique attributes of this community is that they cater to helping rockhounds in their pursuit of specimens. In fact, one of the first places you should stop is at the Chamber of Commerce for a list of digging sites in the region. The Chamber also has a small museum that will inspire you displaying a huge variety of the minerals of the area, most in magnificently large crystal form so that you can see what you re looking for. We stopped at the MacDonald Mine and the Aqua Rose Quarry for faceting rough primarily smoky and rose quartz. Both locations boast a number of mineral types, but they require much more of a hunt than that for the quartz specimens. I was fortunate enough to get a three inch long yellow beryl out of some old tailings in the Aqua Rose Quarry. Everywhere we went, we found something worth keeping a road cut with tremolite and navy apatite, gigantic mica and betafite, and our most rewarding finds were beryl from the Beryl Pit. This location is about a half-hour east of Bancroft, and worth the trip. It costs $5 per person and your take-home allowance is one backpack or one bucket. This site had large beryl crystals, large blocks of amazonite, purple fluorite, schorl, and nice fans of cleavelandite with columbite in-between some of them. I also found a broken piece of an amazingly vibrant, dark aqua blue definitely intriguing and a call to return. In fact, we will be planning a trip for July 2007 and it would be great if the members of the Mineral Section would wish to join that trip. I hope I have inspired you to consider a long-distance trip such as one to Bancroft, Ontario. There are many non-ny sites that are practical for a weekend dig, and I look forward to sharing about the sites we are fortunate enough to visit. Left: Keith working an outcrop in Bancroft Above: Keith and Cindi examining a potential pegmatite outcrop Apatite in calcite from Bancroft 5

6 Thanks to Chuck, Nancy, and Cindi for their contributions to this issue of the RocKester News!! In addition, photo credits are due to Jutta D., as well as to Dan S. of the Lapidary Club. Please be reminded that the RocKester News is your publication. Without input from our membership, there will be no publication. Submissions of articles, specimen photos, and even ideas of information that you would like to see in these pages are welcome. Send them to the editor at the address shown on the mailing page, or preferably, via at: