Rocks for the Ages: In the Valley, there's wulfenite and kyanite (and silver) if you know where to look
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
To all of you out there who remember rocks and minerals as just one more ho-hum topic you had to wade through in science class - well, it's time to take a second look.
Rocks and minerals (broadly speaking, a rock is made up of minerals), in fact, are anything but ho-hum. And the Pioneer Valley just happens to have bragging rights to some particularly dazzling specimens.
Some have been gathered in exotic, far-off locales - Madagascar, Chile, Siberia. But others have been found right here, literally underfoot, thanks to upheavals many millions of years ago that transformed the Valley into what's been called "a geological paradise."
*****
To get a crash course in the subject, head for Amherst College's sleek new Museum of Natural History (admission is free) and park yourself in front of what museum educator Steven Sauter calls "the big knock-your-socks-off case."
Located in a long hallway outside the museum proper, the case is like a scene from "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." There's a deep purple raw amethyst from Brazil, so outrageously sized you'd need a wheelbarrow to carry it. There's a chunk of swirly green malachite from Arizona that's as big as a watermelon. There's natrolite, with no place of origin listed, but so gaudy - flashy white spikes on a flamingo-pink "host" - that it could have emerged from Vegas.
Move down to the next display and you'll find the local specimens. They're not showstoppers like those in the first case. But they are intriguing nonetheless: a window into the ancient, mysterious innards of the Valley. Ever hear of wulfenite? Probably not, but it's found in Southampton. Kyanite, from Chesterfield? Or almandine, from Huntington?
The case also contains an unprepossessing specimen that local rockhounds nonetheless consider their Holy Grail. More on that later.
Amherst's collection of some 8,500 specimens, encompassing 800 types of minerals, was initiated by its illustrious 19th-century president, Edward Hitchcock.
Hitchcock, Steve Sauter says, visited every single town in Massachusetts in his role as state geologist. "Anything there was to find, he actually found it." Many of those discoveries had economic implications, sustaining a once-bustling mining industry. There was copper in Whately. Galena - lead ore - in Hatfield and Easthampton. Emery in Chester. Manganese and rhodonite in Plainfield. And schist in Goshen and Ashfield, which is still mined today. The lobby of the Amherst museum, in fact, is tiled with Ashfield stone, a sedimentary relic of the ocean floor.
*****
Jessica Simonoff is scrunched down, surrounded by a little pile of nondescript grayish rocks. A magnifier dangles from a lanyard around her neck. Next to her is a white bucket filled with murky water.
Every now and then Jessica, who exhibits a preternatural degree of focus for an 11-year-old, swishes one of the rocks in the bucket and then examines it intently. "Here's some pyromorphite and jasper," she says after one such inspection. A short while later comes another pronouncement: "Manganese oxide."
She's there with her parents, Bob and Sara, who are similarly engaged. The three had driven up from their home in Maryland a few days earlier to attend the East Coast Gem and Mineral Show in West Springfield, and they rounded out the trip with excursions to two Connecticut Valley collecting spots, the Tripp Mine in Alstead, N.H., and the Loudville Mine, which overlaps Easthampton and Southampton. That's where Jessica is engrossed in her pile of rocks on this bright August morning.
Their guide has been Wayne Corwin of Belchertown. Corwin is one of the mainstays of the Connecticut Valley Mineralogical Club (see sidebar on Page 28) and moderates various message boards on the Web site mindat.org, which collects mineralogical data from around the world. Mindat is where he and the Simonoffs connected, since it's a go-to spot for all things rock-related. Bob Simonoff is also a moderator there.
Loudville was once home to one of the Valley's thriving mining operations, which produced piles of detritus that made for terrific rock hunting. These days most of those sites are closed to the public - blame insurance and liability concerns - and only people who have built relationships with the land owners have even a chance of getting in. Over the past three decades Corwin has worked at some of the region's remaining quarries, meaning that he is both well-versed and well-connected.
The Loudville site, though, is in the New England Forestry Foundation's Hartnett-Manhan Memorial Forest, and it's open to all comers. The foundation allows rock collecting there as long as people keep to a few basic rules, like taking care to fill in any holes they've dug - and taking care not to cut any trees in order to get to the goods.
Jessica and her parents are knowledgeable about what the site has to offer. "Jessica started collecting when she was 2," says Bob Simonoff. "She went to a zoo, and never saw any animals - her hands were filled with rocks. She just took off with it." Since then her parents have encouraged their daughter's passion: "Jess and I will gladly drive 3½ hours for collecting," her father says. That's just for day trips; they've gone on longer overnight excursions too. Jessica says her dream expedition would take her even farther afield, to the Pala mines in Southern California, or Minas Gerais, a famous collecting region in Brazil.
Right now, though, the family is at a site that was a steady source of lead, and occasionally silver as well, in the 18th and 19th centuries; according to local lore, Revolutionary War patriot Ethan Allen once worked at the Loudville Mine, perhaps making musket balls. "It's actually a beautiful spot," Bob Simonoff says. "Too nice for an old lead mine." Dappled sunlight filters down through the tree canopy, earth-toned mushrooms poke up from beneath layers of fallen leaves, and just a few feet away the Manhan River cheerfully gurgles its way downstream.
While their digging isn't likely to yield anything surprising - collectors have been coming here for decades and the site is considered "played out" - there's the possibility of some decent finds. "The list of minerals here is 65 to 70 long," Bob Simonoff notes. "We'll get anything interesting, box it up, and do some tests under the 'scope at home."
He finds a specimen that he theorizes might be alligator quartz. Sara Simonoff comes across some galena - the raw material from which lead is extracted - embedded in a chunk of milky quartz. Jess Simonoff spots a rock with a hint of malachite, and some rust-colored wulfenite ("Wulfie!"). Corwin, a hint of excitement surfacing in his otherwise steady-as-she-goes manner, holds up another find: "This green, this green ... I think might be turquoise." It is, he adds, a bit of a rarity in these parts.
*****
"These parts" have a wild and weird history when it comes to rocks and minerals. It is, as a Web site hosted by the University of Massachusetts biology department puts it, "a geological paradise - a 300-mile-long museum of our earth's history."
That museum is made up of what Smith College geologist John Brady calls "the soup" of the Connecticut River Valley, the figurative cauldron that cooked up an unusually broad assortment of rocks and minerals.
There were glaciers, volcanoes, earthquakes, flooding, land masses colliding and breaking apart. And all that uproar, over hundreds of millions of years, left a telltale trail: layers miles deep that bear witness to it - if you know where, and how, to look.
Brady takes his "Geology in the Field" students to Cape Cod, Cape Ann, the Adirondacks. But he also takes them to places closer to the Smith campus. There are the famous dinosaur footprints, of course, in Holyoke. Behind the Stop & Shop in Greenfield there's an outcrop of pillow basalt that offers vivid evidence of long-ago lava flows, he says. And just this year a road project in Northampton provided another window into the Valley's past: construction along Earle Street, near the site of the former state hospital, "cut nicely into Lake Hitchcock clays," Brady says - Lake Hitchcock being the enormous body of water that covered the Valley back at the end of the Ice Age.
Those kinds of formations offer the big picture. For the smaller, more particular picture, narrow your focus to the individual ingredients in that soup that John Brady speaks of. The Web site mindat.org says 133 minerals have been documented in Hampshire County alone, an array that runs literally from A (actinolite) to Z (zoisite), and includes local curiosities like Cummingtonite and Goshenite. Corwin says he's come across other sources that give a higher number, 177. He thinks there are probably even more than that.
"Most places if they have 50 minerals within a county are doing pretty good," Corwin says. Hampshire County leaves those locales in the dust; he knows of a single location, in Belchertown, that has yielded 48 minerals.
Quartz is the most common mineral in Hampshire County, according to Corwin. And the rarest? He's not sure. But that "Holy Grail" mentioned back at the beginning is a contender. Here's a clue: It just happens to be the state mineral.
*****
Like Jessica Simonoff, Wayne Corwin was drawn to rocks early on. He's now 55, and his ardor has not dimmed. He wears a royal blue baseball cap that says "I Dig Rocks," and he maintains a Web site - www.idigrocks.com - where he document his finds (including a photo of the first rock he ever collected, a piece of quartz), sells specimens and posts dramatic videos of blasting operations at New England quarries, complete with booming musical accompaniment in the form of "The 1812 Overture."
He's plastered the "I Dig Rocks" message on the front of his Ford Bronco, which looks like it's been down some rugged trails. A license plate attached to the bumper reads "Rockhound."
Corwin was born in New York, where his father, a surveyor, worked on the construction of the New York State Thruway. When he found an interesting rock he'd bring it home for the family to admire. Later they moved to Milton, to a house that happened to be - well, not much more than a stone's throw from a granite quarry. Corwin would spend hours scavenging among the waste rock. "That was my playground," he says.
When he was around 8, his teacher noticed that he would come in from recess with fistfuls of rocks, and she asked him to teach a class about them. And that, he says, was when he "knuckled down" and got serious about his hobby.
Corwin moved to Belchertown in 1973. He liked the Valley's "peaceful, quiet" ways, and he also liked the prospect of good collecting.
Sometimes he'd camp out in a quarry for weeks at a time, hunting for specimens. That led to paying jobs operating and repairing the heavy equipment used in mining. For Corwin, "I Dig Rocks" is a slang expression, and also a description of his livelihood.
He has no real formal education in mineralogy. But he reads a lot, and has forged relationships with geology professors at local colleges. And then there's all that hands-on experience, which has helped him develop a sixth sense about where desirable mineral deposits might be located. "Following my nose, so to speak," he says.
In the 1980s Corwin had an accident that sidelined him from work. To pass the time he decided to visit his parents in Florida, figuring he'd do some collecting along the way. "I left in January and told my folks I'd be there in about six weeks. I arrived in mid-June." He'd scouted out rock club meetings along the way, and more often than not those led to invitations: "The person would say, ¿I'm going on a trip next week - would you like to go?' " Corwin shrugs. "Why not?"
By the time he arrived at his parents' home he was hauling 1½ tons of rocks in the 20-foot trailer he'd hitched up to the Bronco.
When his mother and father finished laughing, he recalls, they asked the obvious question: What on earth are you going to do with all those rocks?
Corwin rented space at a Florida flea market and started selling his finds, which was the start of his "I Dig Rocks" business.
The specimens he sells are ones that he doesn't need for his own collection, which he happily opens up to fellow collectors seeking clues about what to be on the lookout for at various sites. He donates some specimens to the Connecticut Valley Mineral Club, or to area colleges. What's left goes up for sale. He rarely buys rocks, preferring to find his own, or trade with other collectors.
He has returned to mining as well, working at various times in Goshen and Ashfield helping to excavate the landscape stone that those towns are noted for, and at other sites in the Northeast, unearthing fluorite, mica, tourmaline and more.
The fact that nature can create the beauty he's observed in minerals astounds Corwin. Consider the endless variations found in quartz, he says: "Clear. Smoky gray. Big crystals. Thousands of tiny little crystals ... " He's fascinated by the effort it takes for those crystals to form, the way they've had to fight for space as they work their way in and around other minerals. "These crystals took thousands of years to grow," Corwin says, holding a piece of quartz he's picked up at the Loudville site. "Yet they grew so perfect."
*****
"I love this rock right here," Bryan Delaney of Easthampton says, showing off a piece of crocoite made up of tiny crystals in a brilliant shade of orange. "I love the color."
Then there's his jewel-tone red vanadinite. "This is one of my absolute favorites," he says.
There's sky-blue celestite. And orange-white selenite. And brownish-whitish fluorite. And his crystallized fossilized clamshell, which is pretty amazing, it must be said.
In fact, Bryan appears smitten with every single one of the rocks that he's got arranged neatly on just about every flat surface in his bedroom. He's ready, willing and more than able to regale a visitor with details about what it's made of, where it came from, and how he got it.
His enthusiasm is contagious. His mother, LeeAnn Delaney, jokes that she's always been interested in rocks - that would be "emeralds, rubies, opals and whatnot" - but says that her interest has taken a turn. "When you really look at them," she says of rocks, "the color, the forms, and you think, wow, this took millions of years, it's pretty amazing. I have to admit - it's grabbed me, too."
It was a trip to the Rock, Fossil & Dinosaur Shop in Deerfield about six years ago that first "grabbed" Bryan, who is 12 and a seventh-grader at Blessed Sacrament School in Holyoke. The shop has a setup where visitors can sift for specimens in sand. "I got a whole box," he recalls. "I thought they were very cool."
Soon he was adding to his collection by going to A2Z Science and Learning Store in Northampton and to events like the East Coast Gem and Mineral Show - a cavalcade of eye candy, if you're a collector. He studies rock and mineral books, and uses what's known as a stereo microscope to see his collection up close.
Lately he's been heading into the field to find his own minerals. He and his parents joined the Connecticut Valley Mineral Club this spring ("a great group," LeeAnn Delaney says, with members who are more than willing to share tips), and Bryan's gone on several of the club's excursions.
In upstate New York he wielded a sledgehammer, chisel and pick to hunt for Herkimer diamonds (not true diamonds, but so flawless that they could serve as Exhibit A for the term "crystal clear"). "You look in the rock and find a black hole," Bryan says. "You chisel that rock. If you're lucky there's a Herkimer diamond." As it turned out, he was lucky, coming away with a specimen that he calls "my prize find."
A club outing to Roxbury, Conn., offered easier pickings: "The whole mine was flooded with garnets," Bryan says. And it was a good deal, he adds. The $2 fee - the owner of the property advises people to leave their cash under the doormat if he's not home - yielded an entire bucketful of rocks embedded with tiny garnet crystals.
This month, Bryan is joining a CVMC trip to Maine's Newry Mines. They're noted for tourmalines, crystals that range from black to white to vivid primary shades, and he's looking forward to the prospect of finding some. "I love to collect beryl, tourmaline, aquamarine, stuff like that."
*****
The mineral Bryan Delaney wants more than any other, though, isn't in Maine, or Connecticut, or New York. It's that Holy Grail mentioned above, and it's found right here in Massachusetts.
"It's Babingtonite, actually," Bryan says.
He's not the only one who covets it. "Babingtonite is probably the thing that most people would love to be finding," Wayne Corwin says.
Good luck with that. Lustrous, jet-black Babingtonite became the state mineral back in 1971 due to the very fact of its rarity: The commonwealth is one of the few spots in the world where it occurs. While it's been found in quarries in Westfield, Holyoke, Amherst and Deerfield, Corwin says, none of those quarries allows public collecting anymore, so the chances of finding it have become decidedly slim.
But who knows? That's the allure of being a rock collector. If you do your homework, chip away at it and toss in a little serendipity, what you're looking for may be right underfoot.
Margot Cleary can be reached at MCleary@gazettenet.com.
Comments
Post new comment