This morning I took a walk to the Yatzecks campsite to see if they were awake for breakfast and had to admire the mushrooms growing on a log at the edge of their site.  They’re gigantic!

Our main objective today was to look for Herkimer diamonds (aka quartz crystals) in the mine at our campground. We paid $12 for adults and $7 for kids to mine.  My mom didn’t mine but just helped Nova and watched.  We didn’t have to drive at all today since the mine is right on site and that was a nice change. 

To mine here, you use shovels to dig in the dirt for the crystals or break the geode-like crystals out of bigger rocks. Here I am searching for them in the dirt.

Joey and Lily found crystals embedded in rock.  Here is Joey’s.

Esme tried cracking open a big rock but it was too big of a job for a rock pick.  We ended up borrowing a sledge hammer and breaking it for her.

It drizzled off and on and sometimes the sun came out.  It was only 52 degrees today though so the rain was not refreshing. 

Someone lost their keys in the mine and I let them use our metal detectors to look for them.  They didn’t find them but they found a spare key which saved the day.  

Eventually, it was just me, Joey, Joe and Melissa left mining.  Even we gave up during a particularly heavy rain shower and went back to the campsite and cleaned our diamonds under the awning. 

These were some of Nova’s (the two on the left) and my diamonds after we washed them.

We sent the kids out to make a fire and roast hot dogs.  I made mac and cheese inside and got to eat my bowl in relative peace.  Melissa and I are trying to do a book club on this trip and I got in about 25 pages between activities today.  Not impressive but we have a lot going on all the time.

Here is our campsite at Crystal Grove. 

We finished dinner with a dessert of s’mores again.  We have terrible reception here so I’m going to leave the day’s blog right there so I can leave the porch of the camp store for the warmth of the camper.

Yatzecks blog post for today