HerkiMiners

Nick and I are leaving our lives in Brooklyn to become quartz miners in Upstate New York. A reality series based on our lives will air on NatGeo, and it will be titled “HerkiMiners.” Or “Mining by Design-” although that one is much more up Bravo’s alley. We’re shopping it around. If NatGeo bites, we could have a cross-over special with the Bering Sea Gold guys called “HerkiMiners: Gold Rush.”

But so backstory: a year ago, we went quartz digging in Washington State. We found a bazillion pieces of quartz- mostly pretty crappy quality. But it was SO FUN. I instantly was obsessed and as soon we reentered civilization, whipped out my phone and started frantically Googling, “QUARTZ MINING EAST COAST” “QUARTZ DIGGING NEW YORK” “GEMSTONE HUNTING TRISTATE,” in all caps, to convey the urgency and excitement to Siri. When “Herkimer diamonds” showed up in the results, my head almost exploded.

See, I already was enamored of Herkimer diamonds, the double-terminated, naturally-faceted quartz crystals beloved by hippies and Etsy jewelers everywhere. I guess I never drew the connection between Herkimer, NEW YORK and Herkimer Diamonds. Or maybe I did, but didn’t realize you could try to find them yourself. Either way, it became my mission to make a trip up there happen, ASAP.

And so more than a year passed. Every day since the mines opened for the season in April, I’ve been saying, “Let’s go this weekend.” But a 4-hour+ drive upstate is not something you can undertake lightly. Two weeks ago, we looked at our schedules and realized that if we didn’t go this weekend, we were not going to be able to go before the mines closed again.

A car was booked. Tools were purchased. We made it happen.

So turns out, clawing beautiful crystals from the cold, hard earth with nothing but your own manpower is, like, not super easy. Upon one’s arrival at the mine (we went to Ace of Diamonds, also a good NatGeo show name), one is confronted with a large pile of rocks. A VERY large pile. Of many rocks. The guy working the admissions desk (admissions is $10, btw, and you keep what you find) gave us some vague instructions of what to look for, showed us a map with some scribbles and labels like “rocks and dirt w/crystals,” and sent us on our way. It’s important to note that this man bore more than a passing resemblance to George R.R. Martin.

I found a couple crystals on the ground almost right away. I was like, “wow, this is so easy! I’m going to open a Herkimer diamond store.” Then s*** got real. Basically, you have to just smash rocks with sledgehammers with reckless abandon and hope a couple crystals fall out. Those two I found on the ground were flukes in our experience- although everyone online is like, “You can find so many crystals in the dirt,” that was decidedly not the case. I spent a lot of time sifting through said dirt, and didn’t find a single one for the rest of the day.

But sledgehammers are pretty tricky, too. These are real live rocks, and they are HARD. Also, it’s pretty much a total crapshoot as to which rock will have anything inside. We found crystals in tiny rocks, in giant boulders, in rocks with lots of druzy and rocks with no druzy. It’s like the world’s hardest Easter Egg hunt, where your parents (excuse me, the Easter Bunny) decided to hide rocks instead of plastic eggs, and only 1% of the rocks have candy inside.

The main caveat with the hammer and chisel route is that you have to use quite a bit of force, which means that IF there was a crystal inside, you probably just smashed it to pieces or sent it flying, perhaps to be found by some n00b in the future. Despite all this, though, we found a nice handful of really pretty Herkimer diamonds, ranging in size from “high school promise ring” to “Kardashian.”

So now the real question is… what will we do with them?

And when can we go back?