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Trip to the Stephenson-Bennett Mine, Dona Ana County, NM
You are here: MineralCollecting.org >> Posted Articles >> Article 34

by Darren Court

Just a quick note on a trip to the Stephenson-Bennett Mine, Dona Ana County, NM this past Saturday. I left pretty early in order to beat the heat and parked on the road below the mine about 7:30 Saturday morning. Didn't beat it though, and it caught up with me quite soon. There is about a 3/4 mile hike to the mine, up a slope, watching for rattlesnakes the whole way, but the scenery is nice so as long as you keep one eye on the ground you're in pretty good shape. The mine itself is inaccessible, the adits have all been either bulldozed ship, or have "bat doors" on them. The dumps are still pretty productive though, and the bladed area below the mine where the mill tailings and dump were removed a few years ago still contains some pretty good wulfenite, mimetite, and others.

Anyway, this trip I decided to follow a road around and up to the top of the hill where the mine is located, to visit some of the upper dumps. Usually I prowl around on the lower workings and have found wulfenite in pseudocubes, bars, blades and bipyramids; the upper workings contain a bit of wulfenite but have mainly cerussite and hemimorphite, as well as a lot of quartz and massive fluorite. On the upper dumps I found some very nice reticulated cerussite groups to about .5 cm, as well as a few sixlings in a 2 cm vug. One 1.5 cm. vug contained nice prismatic cerussites stacked around a small spray of hemimorphite, but on a chunk of rock about 4 inches, I'll let you know how the trimming goes! Unusual quartz on quartz and a few quartz crystals with phantoms round out what was found there.

Making my way back aruond to where I usually collect, I found some nice large blocks of massive quartz containing galena and some small vugs full of malachite needles and what looks an awful lot like caledonite. The structure of caledonite was determined from a sample collected at this location, so could be... Anyway, it's a nice small 2 mm spray on quartz. Also in that area were nice tiny cerussite blades and sprays, and pseudocubic wulfenites on calcite. It was now about noon and I was drenched and getting hot, so it was time to call it a day.

Only took home 2 flats (usually get 5 or 6) so I'll busy going through the stuff in the next couple of days. Other trips have turned up mainly the same, but also mottramite, mimetite, and pyromorphite. I guess that's it from New Mexico. Thanks for reading this and I wish you all Happy Collecting!

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