Jim Glen and I attended the Central U. S. Micro Mineral Symposium in September 2019. Once there we decided to spend some extra time collecting and based on some advice we received from Mike Howard, opted to go to the Twin Creek Mine. So Sunday morning we woke up early and headed out for the 90 minute or so drive to the Mt. Ida area. Driving on the interstate we managed to safely get past someone who decided to go the wrong way on the freeway. The rest of the drive was uneventful and we soon found ourselves at the Twin Creek Mine twin-creek-crystal-mine.business.site
There are dozens of collecting sites in the Mt. Ida area. Mike had recommended the Twin Creek mine because it’s a good source for really clear, gemmy quartz crystals. They charge $25 an adult and you can keep everything you find. They also have tools and buckets for rent but we came prepared. The collecting area is quite large and heavy equipment is used regularly to scrape the face and turn over material.
One approach to collecting here is to work the rock face but this looked quite demanding requiring a lot of physical effort with the risk that the crystals 3and plates would break. Given it was 95⁰F we chose to pass on this approach.
The easy way to collect is to just walk around and look for the reflections of the crystal points. This is a good approach for finding points and smaller clusters and occasionally you’ll be rewarded with larger pieces. Another approach is to look at the bigger chunks and boulders and turn them over. We found a few large pieces like this and then spent time to trim them down. The challenge is to break the pieces down without fracturing the plates of quartz crystals – it is really challenging to keep the large plates intact.
As I said it was hot and most of the site is in the open with only a little bit of shade at the one side along the tree line. We mostly had blue skies but there were some small clouds periodially that provided some relief but after 3 hours or so we were done, knowing that we had several hours of driving ahead of us. Hopefully I’ll be able to return to this area some time soon.