It will fluoresce a brilliant, easy to notice orange color when exposed to the light. Ruby glows when exposed to green or blue laser light or UV light. Modern Technology is wonderful – especially when it works properly Please stay on Ruby Mine Road until you reach the Cherokee Mine.
At the next intersection (1-1/2 miles), keep right at the “COWEE VALLEY” sign and the mine will be 2-1/2 miles on the left.ĭO NOT TAKE COON CREEK ROAD or FLOWERS GAP ROAD.ĪDDITIONALLY: It has been brought to our attention that the evil GPS will also try and lead you astray from the paths of righteous gem hunting, and try to tell you to turn onto RUBY KNOLL LANE, or onto GEMSTONE LANE. From that point you will proceed north to Cowee Creek Road, which is just after the Cowee Baptist Church, where you bear right. Be prepared!įor BEST results, FIRST please enter address of “4433 Bryson City Road” THEN enter address of “2586 Ruby Mine Road, Franklin NC 28734”. Any directions which state “Take Coon Creek Road” or “Flowers Gap Road” are INCORRECT! That will force you to turn back and start over.Ĥ433 Bryson City Road is the intersection of Sanderstown Road and Bryson City Road (also known as Route 28). Bring sunscreen, water, bug spray, and food. Mining can be tough on the hands so you might want gloves too. You might want to bring a magnifying device, tweezers, and plastic bags so you can extract tiny finds and save them in a place you won’t lose them. Keep in mind that some of the gemstones might be extremely tiny or obscured by surface coatings. The flume is a channel of running water used to clean the dirt off your gemstones, which you screen in it and carefully examine to sort the gems from the leaverites. Then they will provide you with a bucket of material to bring to the flume. $5.00 per additional bucket of our 100% Unsalted Gem Ore.Īt the mine, you will be shown specimens of the gemstones so you know what to look for before they let you loose. Discounts cannot be combined, conjoined, transferred, conferred, or multiplied. (Military ID Card is Required Upon Admission) Military Veterans: $5.00 Admission Discount Includes One (1) Pre-Filled Buckets of our 100% Unsalted Gem Ore.Īctive U.S. Group Rate (20 people or more): $5.00 discount Per Person Other non-mining members of a group are welcome to enjoy our picnic area and lawnchairs. Only paid miners are permitted to sit on the flume line, other than Li’l Miners as noted above.
#Tn ruby mine free#
( * See below for explanation of this change)Īge 5 and under: Free Admission with an accompanying paid miner (no mining screen or bucket of gem ore provided – Li’l Miners get to “assist” an older accompanying miner). $20.00/Per Person – Includes One (1) Pre-Filled Bucket of our 100% Unsalted Gem Ore. The Cherokee Mine is a fee dig site, meaning you pay to dig their material, but they supply a lot of the equipment you need to go through the gravel! While at the time this is published, Feburary 2021, the mine is closed for winter and the Covid Pandemic, however, we are all looking forward to a re-opening of this location, hopefully, in summer 2021, if life works out well.Ĭheck out Bryan Major digging at the Cherokee Mine video below to get an idea of what the experience there is like! It is up to you to screen through the material and identify what is a gem, and what isn’t… but the kind staff is more than willing to help you! This material is alluvial, meaning these crystals weathered out of metamorphic rock and tumbled around for thousands of years until they arrived at the mine, so given this, the ore is in the form of soil that contains the weathered-out gemstones.
Though ruby, sapphire, and corundum in general are the focus, other minerals namely red rhodolite garnet, blue-white kyanite, and metallic red brown rutile can be found with them too. The Cherokee Mine in Macon County, North Carolina offers awesome ruby and sapphire sluicing from 100% local, unsalted material right from their mine! Many of the sluice mines in the Southeast “salt” their material, meaning they enrich it with stones from all over the world and this can be disappointing when you expected to find something right from the ground beneath your feet. A beautiful red ruby straight from the Cherokee Mine.ĭigging your own precious native gemstone may sound too good to be true to a lot of folks.