Also close to Cooperstown is the Herkimer Diamond Mine.  They aren’t really diamonds, but are very clear quartz crystals that look sort of like diamonds.  In the rough they are often faceted and sparkly!

At the mine you pay for a day and are given a zip-loc bag and a small sledgehammer and pointed to the mine – a rock quarry!  You break rocks open and will sometimes find little black “pockets” in the rock that might contain the little crystals.  We found a few, shown in the pictures below.  You get to keep any that you find!

It’s not as easy as it looks.  First, you’re out in the middle of a field of sharp rocks, so walking around is difficult and then you have to squat or find a place to sit and a flat, larger rock to put your smaller rocks on so you can pound away at them!  There were lots of people doing just that!

While we were there, one person found a really nice crystal that was probably the size of a peanut.  WOW!  Ours are smaller, in one picture I superimposed a picture of a dime the correct size so you can get a sense of how small ours are.  But, we found them by breaking open rocks, so it was a very interesting morning!!

Here are pictures of the mine site and the ‘diamonds’ we found:

While staying in Cooperstown, NY, we saw that there was a cave less than an hour away, so we decided to visit it.  We were a bit dismayed to see that it has very few formations and they aren’t that spectacular.  The cavern still has a river running through it and for much of its history the river was the major feature, which inhibited the growth of stalactites and stalagmites.

The tour of the cavern included a boat ride through part of the cave that still has water a few feet deep; while interesting there were NO formations to be seen while in the boat.

The best feature was an area called “The Winding Way” which indeed did wind around quite a bit in a narrow passageway, in some areas so narrow you had to turn sideways to get your shoulders through it.  Luckily for me (claustrophic!) it had a high ceiling so I was ok.

Here are pictures we took of the cavern: