SMOKEY HOLLOW NC
It started with chicken house
North Carolina and surrounding areas is known for small pockets of super high-grade smoky quartz. These crystals are comparable to Swiss Alps material and sometimes would be hard to distinguish the two. Most digs for this material have not been very prolific so it is not well known. Some of the material has been dug while in search of the emeralds in the Hiddenite area of North Carolina.
We have done some prospecting in Shelby county in search of this really good quality smoky quartz.
The summer of 2020 Charlie Smith was working as an excavator operator in Rutherford county between Shelby and Alexander (Hiddenite) county. They were putting large commercial chicken houses onto the side of a hill so they had to flatten it to make room for this construction. Charlie called me up and told me that he and a couple of fellow workers had been finding a lot of smoky quartz.
Bonanza
We had full permission to work this site as well as machines available to us. As is typical for these areas, the quartz popped out of seams of mica. Someone would use a large excavator to dig a trench right next to the Mica seam and we would stand in the trench and search for these little pockets and later bigger pockets of spectacular, gemmy smoky quartz. In a way some of the easier digging I had ever done.
We found clusters and individuals of Tessin habit with unusual shapes, we found pieces with red rutile attached to them. We found pieces with black tourmaline attached to them. Many pieces had cubic pyrite inside of them.
We found one spectacular piece with a liquid inclusion that moved that had moving pyrite in the liquid.
Many crystals were found in this location over the period of about a month. But as is typical with North Carolina finds they were all spectacular but none of them were consistent, two of these, three of those, one of these, etc.
Awesome Crystals
2 years later while doing a live show in Tucson and showing off one of these clusters I had just lowered the price and had someone claimed sold when I looked into a hole on the back side of the cluster and saw small emerald crystals. Although not totally unexpected, there were no reports of emerald crystals being found in Rutherford county before this. That lucky buyer that had claimed sold before anyone seeing the emeralds was extra lucky. See video of discovery below.
Sadly the construction had to go on and they covered this side of this mountain with large commercial chicken houses.
We did some searching in the property surrounding but these small pockets are very site-specific and not necessarily in generalized areas. In fact, only 1/3 of the construction site produced crystals.
If you can imagine a mountain covered in trees and grass and leaves and trying to find that again without the construction is almost impossible.
Although many of these crystals have sold, we still carry some of these pieces in our mineral City location in Tucson.
If you come to visit us, be sure to ask about them. They're hidden gems even in our shop.