Revisiting Dripps Road

The 4th week end of February 2008 I made the trip from Thetford Mines, Qc Canada south for 6 hours to see my children and to get out of the snow.
The first day I arrived at Middletown, Connecticut at my daughter’s apartment, I literally fell on my knees and grabbed some unfrozen soil in my hands and savored the wonderful odor of unfrozen dirt.
The next day I took advantage of the weather (no snow covering the earth yippee!) to visit two of my old favorite areas. Dripps Rd in Middletown and later the New Britian area.
Dripps Rd is now owned by a the Derita Construction company. I asked permission and got permission to look at the cuts as they are today. About 18 years ago I stumbled on a nice deposit of almandine-spessartine crystals Here is a photo of the cut that remains.

I scoured the cuts and boulders around but couldn’t find a decent garnet. I did find this rough biotite xl.

These are some examples of the pegmatite

Notice the piece on the right has some garnet but not well crystallized. The small piece in the center was quartz with green coating that fluoresced green in the SW. Also there was green fluorescent areas on the others.

This is a magnification of the small piece of quartz with biotite and green fluorescent mineral, which is probably autunite.
It was about 20 years ago, I was living in Middlefield and I systematically checked out old pegmatite pits and quarries on the Middle Haddam Quadrangle. I remember when I entered this locality there were boulders behind a line of excavation trucks. One just tucked in the corner had garnets close to 2” peeking out at me. Needless to say I was very excited. I came back with some of my mineral friends and began taking apart some of these boulders and digging in the wall. I had my Ford pick up then with some heavy tools, so I loaded up pieces to take home. Later others followed me and got too zealous digging into banks without permission, and ticked off the owners.
Later my friend Russ Benhke and I co -wrote a small article about this find, which entered the Minerological Record under new garnet localities. Russ told me that the Dripps Road garnets were analyzed and found to be about 50% almandine and 50% spessartine
Here is an example of some of the garnets in feldspar.

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