Red Marble Mine, Addy Roadcut – May 2021
We were in the area so we decided to head up to the Red Marble Mine. This is a spot that we have visited previously. Some people told us that it was actively being mined and that it had been fully mined and there was no material left. This seemed doubtful so we went to check it out for ourselves. The mine did indeed look like it had been recently worked: the boulders blocking the road looked like they had been rearranged since our last visit and there were more piles of gravel in the pit. However, there is still a nearly infinite amount of material. We found some red marble with magnesite in it and some other rock with very fine pyrite on the surface.
After the Red Marble Mine we headed to the roadcut in Addy. This also is a spot that we have visited previously. Last time we drove by here we noticed that the concrete barriers had been removed so we returned to check to see what kind of work was being done at the roadcut. We found that the shoulder at the base of the roadcut had been filled in the dirt and gravel and compressed with machinery. In addition, the wall of the roadcut was covered in dirt which made inspecting the rock difficult. We found evidence of other rockhounds looking for trilobite fossils and found the rear end of a trilobite in one of their discard piles. This is the most evidence of a trilobite fossil that we’ve ever seen at this spot. The rock across the road from the roadcut was easier to search through because it wasn’t covered in dirt like the roadcut was. We found some nice sea sponge fossil specimens in that material but nothing too exciting.
