Report on the Fall Micromineral Trip to the Arkansas Syenites.
I arrived in Bryant, Arkansas Tuesday evening about 7 PM and immediately ran into Jim Stoops. He, Bob Rothenberg, Robin Tibbet and John Whatley were the “group” for this trip.
On Wednesday, we met for breakfast at 7:30 and discussed the collecting schedule. During breakfast, I realized I had forgotten my hard hat, so several of us went to a nearby Lowes and got hats. Once packed up we drove down to the Martin Marietta Jones Mill Quarry near Magnet Cove to collect. We were hoping that we would find gas cavities on the upper western benches, but as the day progressed, we found very few. After lunch we went to the main pit bottom to look for pegmatite. Nothing showed up. The weather was great, but the collecting was the poorest we’ve had in years. All we could do was go back to the motel to rest, and dream about future collecting trips.
On Thursday we visited the 3M Big Rock Quarry south of Little Rock. This normally busy quarry was nearly deserted. The demand for roofing granules is so low that they are not moving a lot of rock. A sub-contractor is crushing the central nepheline syenite dike for aggregate materials, and that is about all the rock that is being removed right now. We were not able to find any pegmatite that contained open cavities, but managed to recover some gas cavities and a few xenoliths that were interesting. By mid-afternoon we were ready to move on and drove down to the Granite Mountain #3 Quarry near Bryant in Saline County. This fascinating quarry has great potential, but is very difficult to collect in. This trip it was idle. They are only removing stockpiled aggregate and nothing has been done in the pit for nearly a year. We found some of the pegmatite with the large embedded lavenite crystals and one interesting gas cavity. Once again collecting was not up to our usual expectations.
Friday we visited the Granite Mountain #1 and #2 quarries south of the Big Rock Quarry. These operations are running at full capacity producing aggregate. The #1 quarry has exposed large amounts of the brown nepheline syenite that contains lots of gas cavities and pegmatitic zones. Those of us who had visited before collected a limited amount of the zeolite rich material, but overall collecting was a lot better in this quarry. We met the new company geologist and found out she is interested in minerals. We all offered information and help to her. They have not completed the new ramp, but it remains in the mining plan as does removal of the area with most of the rare minerals. After lunch we drove over to the #2 quarry and checked it out. They were operating in the most favorable area, so we found very little.
Saturday morning we all scattered and drove home. We did find a few interesting things: Some green apophyllite at 3M (first in over 20 years), a really nice group of diopside crystals in a xenolith at 3M and some nice, intense orange stilbite at Granite Mountain #1. Nothing very rare turned up this trip.
Henry Barwood
Troy University
Troy, Alabama USA
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