MY RANT
BRING BACK THE OLD DAYS, 40 YEARS OF COLLECTING
I have tramped and dug in the bush and pounded rocks in quarries for over the last forty years. I have been a member of various clubs, I now belong to 5.
In Ontario and the U.S. there has been a gradual change in how we can collect, not many of them are to my liking. These changes have many reasons, some are fair, others a real detriment to the hobby. In Ontario we have Crown Land, public property owned by the government that we as Rockhounds could go and collect on a small scale without much government interference. The last 10 years or so has seen a land grab of old collecting site property, by City people just buying up any country property they can get their hands on and many old sites are now off limits. The ontario Government now seems to be ruled by the environmental lobby, large tracks of Crown Land are now being turned into Provincial parks where all collecting is banned (York River Scarn Zone outside Bancroft is a fine example). The quarries in Ontario allow some access on an annual or semi-annual basis, for organized groups, but there always seems to be some joker out there that won’t follow the safety guidelines and does his darndest to get us kicked out. The trouble is that the majority of the Quarries are owned by the same company,s get kicked out of one, we get banned in all of them. A lot of this seems to spawn from litigations, fears of lawsuits over injuries and damage done to equipment, stealing Copper wiring, chisels ending up in crushers, unsafe collecting, trespassing .
Most if not all old quarries and mine dumps have to be reclaimed and returned to original condition, taking away another group of collecting spots. Underground mine operations now hardly produces any specimens, as a lot of mines crush underground so there are no dumps and don’t allow the miners time to collect and bring it out in lunch pails.
The problems are different in the United State’s, everything down there is worth a buck; so if a decent collecting site is found someone will claim it and if your lucky it will become a fee site, if not, you will have to buy it at some show, The mineral rights are owned by big companies like Dodge Phelps they own huge chunks of prime collecting areas of some states and collecting is not tolerated. BLM lands are being turned into Wildlife preserves, no collecting allowed, there may be a fee coming soon just to go on public lands.
I guess I have to assume that my glory days of collecting are behind me, the old places are gone, long picked over. Now we long for a new road to be built, hoping by chance something interesting turns up, but usually when it does, it soon gets mined out by a dealer or the highway crews get tired of picking chunks of rock off the roadway or cars on the shoulders blocking traffic and get collecting banned there.
I guess it’s all not doom and gloom, for at the big shows you can buy a worlds worth of fine crystals, so someone must be finding them, but for the lowly rockhound finding that world class specimen, is becoming a thing of the past.
Dick Stata