Diamonds! Well, really very clear crystals…

Also close to Cooperstown is the Herkimer Diamond Mine.  They aren’t really diamonds, but are very clear quartz crystals that look sort of like diamonds.  In the rough they are often faceted and sparkly!

At the mine you pay for a day and are given a zip-loc bag and a small sledgehammer and pointed to the mine – a rock quarry!  You break rocks open and will sometimes find little black “pockets” in the rock that might contain the little crystals.  We found a few, shown in the pictures below.  You get to keep any that you find!

It’s not as easy as it looks.  First, you’re out in the middle of a field of sharp rocks, so walking around is difficult and then you have to squat or find a place to sit and a flat, larger rock to put your smaller rocks on so you can pound away at them!  There were lots of people doing just that!

While we were there, one person found a really nice crystal that was probably the size of a peanut.  WOW!  Ours are smaller, in one picture I superimposed a picture of a dime the correct size so you can get a sense of how small ours are.  But, we found them by breaking open rocks, so it was a very interesting morning!!

Here are pictures of the mine site and the ‘diamonds’ we found: