Wirelesstrips.com

I couldn’t help but think of slot machines as I looked down the 60 odd feet of sluice box and saw all the people at the Emerald Hollow Mine sifting through buckets of dirt hoping to hit the jackpot. If there would have been cocktail waitresses and an all-you-can-eat buffet, the Vegas metaphor would have been complete.

We found out about the Emerald Hollow Mine in Hiddenite, North Carolina, from watching Kristen Gum, host of The Travel Channel’s Cash and Treasures. She made it look like this place had lots of undiscovered treasure (that is the jist of her show, after all).

Well, the reality is a bit different.

Professional wrestling is fixed. Reality TV is scripted. And the Emerald Hollow Mine, while a fun way to spend an afternoon, is a pretend treasure hunt.

Here is how it works…

You pay $15 for a permit that allows you to dig up buckets of dirt which you then haul several hundred yards to the aforementioned sluice box and sift through it to find “precious” gemstones. (Back-breaking work, by the way.)

The fine print, of course, is that emeralds are at least 5 feet deep. So unless you spend a lot of time digging, and doing so in the right place, you aren’t likely to find any.

For the $15, you can also go creeking – which is sifting through the silt in the creek bed for gemstones. On my way to a bathroom break, I overheard two guys talking about the creek bed being “seeded”. I don’t know if that is true, but Frank found two big separate quartz pieces just lying on the bottom of the creek bed that looked like they came from the inside of a geode. It is hard to believe such big rocks like that aren’t in clusters and deep underground. And it is even more difficult to believe those crystals would have gone unnoticed for so long, given all the people that go over that creek bed each day.

If you want to take the easy way out, you can buy a $5 permit and then buy pre-filled buckets of dirt to sift through, some of which are “guaranteed” to yield certain types of stones.

My guess is the mine owners have already taken most of the truly valuable stones and are selling the scraps to the tourists. You can even take what you found and have it turned into jewelry by their on-site jewelry makers.

In a nutshell, Emerald Hollow Mine is Disneyland for rock nerds.

Now, there is nothing wrong with this as long as you understand that is what it is going into it.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.