Prepared and published in the Wayne County Gem and Mineral Club News, October 2015. WCGMC newsletter Oct 2015
Our 14th collecting trip of the year (but who is counting) was, surprisingly, the first official WCGMC venture to St. Lawrence County in 2016. But what we suffered in tardiness, we made up for in quantity. The trip was four days long and included seven separate collecting sites (one, Rose Road, was visited by members on three separate occasions over the 4 days). Several of us stayed in a rented home on Star Lake, owned by Anita Persson, wife of George Persson, who helped us with the Benson Mines visit during the trip.
The trip was not scheduled to start until Thursday morning September 17th, but Bill Chapman and I had arrived in Star Lake early evening on Wednesday and we decided to take Bill’s black light to Rose Road in Pitcairn for an early start. As always the lower area, known to many as the purple diopside mound (or PDM), lit up bright yellow under long wave with the mineral scapolite and the albite at the “wollastonite skarn” (or green diopside mound) lit up red under short wave.
Having been rained and flooded out in June, the WCGMC found a way to squeeze a trip Alden into its August schedule visiting the ever popular site on Saturday August 29th. This time the weather was perfect, the water was low, and, as always the fossils were there to be collected. The formidable Ledyard shale cliffs in the creek bed have been a favorite site for collectors for several decades, but winter erosion always seems to expose new ones to extract with a little digging.
Sometimes things get named too fast and once labeled incorrect associations are very difficult to rectify. Have you ever seen “turritella agate” at your favorite fossil dealer’s table? It has often been polished into cabochons designed to display the whorls of the spiral shaped shell and the agate that has filled the apertures. Raw specimens are attractive as well.
The cabachon on the left is 1.5” high and is from Utah. The raw hand sample on the left is from south central Wyoming. Both are incorrectly labeled turritella agate in their internet source.
