Sunday we went to the moonstone creek location in central Virginia, same place as I have posted here before.  Instead of hitting the creek first and getting “stuck” all day there, I decided we would finally seek out the nearby abandoned mica mines.  There are three main mines and numerous prospect pits.  Here, my son Sean digs at the first one we found.

Garnet balls in freshly broken gneiss -- or maybe this is pegmatite considering the large garnet size.  Such decomposed garnets are everywhere at this general location.  The only gemmy garnets I’ve seen are tiny ones in the very freshest and most solid schist/gneiss.

The best of what we found at the first mine.  Not very good, but I may be able to trim down to massive smoky quartz in the big one.  So we moved on.

Sean admires a view of the second mine.

A blasting bore hole.  This might be of more recent origin, because the current landowner quarried some rock for landscaping walls.  Then again, the bore hole looks rather weathered.

Just about anywhere you brushed away the leaves near mine 2 there would be tailings like this, or larger blocks of quartz and schist.  I found one piece of nearly water clear quartz near Chip’s foot, and many pieces between milky and clear.  I may return for more serious digging in search of the clear massive quartz.  We also found the largest mica scraps here.

After lunch we went to the place where we have had best luck with moonstone.  The stream bed turned up some nice pieces, but I wanted to further explore a certain section of creek bank.  The grayish uppermost layer is clay and mostly stream-worn pebbles and some sharp rock.  Maybe a decomposed conglomerate?  Next down is a zone of red clay with lots of small ho-hum quartz rocks and the occasional moonstone.  Some very nice moonstone can be found floating in this zone, which I suppose is the completely decomposed saprolite of the crumbly schist zone at the bottom.  Sometimes moonstone is in or next to white or black clay that implies a saprolite of little veins of feldspar-biotite pegmatite.  Other times it is right in the middle of red clay. Here’s an example of the white and dark clay, at the transition between clay and less decomposed schist/gneiss.

The small white face in the upper third, slightly right of center, is an example of individual moonstone pieces floating in red clay zone.  All other rock faces are quartz.  Crumbly gneiss layering can be seen below, grayish clay zone above.
(In other stretches of the creek these layers get all mixed up, perhaps indicating a fault or stress zone?)