Trip Report by Dion Stewart
Eighteen people enjoyed the first frost of early Fall last week as we ventured into the Blue Ridge mountain in North Carolina in search of staurolite crosses. The site in Southwestern North Carolina made for a wonderful trip. The land owner met us at the parking area, and was accommodating in so many ways, from giving rides to the best collecting localities, to having previously dug up the hillside leaving large piles of the dirt for some of us to sift through if we did not want to dig our own holes.
The staurolite crosses were so abundant that you had to have poor eyesight and bad-luck if you did not find at least one every minute or so. The staurolite with its higher resistance has weathered out of the underlying mica schist and is found as loose “stars” and “crosses” in the overlying soil. The best recovery method was to sift several shovels full of soil through a coarse sieve and look for anything that resembled pieces from the child’s game of jacks. The youngest member of the group was Lauren at eight years old, and she collected enough crosses to give one to everyone in her class at school.
Most of the adults had close to a hundred by the time we decided to pack it up. I found at least several dozen different twinning shapes (see photo at top) from the famous “X” and Maltese cross, to those that looked like a miniature saguaro cactus. I also ventured around the hillside to where small blocks of the bedrock could be found as “float”, and the staurolite covered the surface of these blocks. The largest cross I found was a beautiful 3-inch “X” cross that stuck out in bas relief from a cobble (see photo above). Everyone praised the owner, who stayed with us the entire time telling us stories of the land and pointing out all sorts of geological features from areas to pan for gold on the property to the surrounding pure silica sand ridges. It was such a great trip that many people were asking when we could come back even before we had finished the day.
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