Fare Thee Well Wholeness Center

The Geology of Crystals

David Demarey

Part 2. The Geology of Crystals.

In the last newsletter, I had mentioned the quartz boulders that occur all over Fare Thee Well and the fact that they are part of a much larger geological event that predates the opening of the rift valley that eventually became the Connecticut Valley we now know.

About 400 million years ago there was a massive up-welling of magma under this part of Western Massachusetts.
It wasn’t a violent volcanic eruption but rather a slow but enormous injection of near molten rock that lifted the land starting in southern Vermont and extending down to a few miles South of where Fare Thee Well resides today.

The highest part of the uplift is centered on Goshen Massachusetts (Called the Goshen Dome) but that is not where the really interesting stuff happened.On both the West and East sides of the intrusion of hot rock, the heating of the ground and the heat of the magma itself, cooked out metals and minerals like Quartz, Gold and Manganese and concentrated them along the edges of the intrusion.
Yes, there is Gold in the Westfield River!
Up until the early 1960’s there was a placer miner running a Gold sluice right under where the bridge for the Mass Pike crosses the river below Mount Tekoa.

Quartz rock, as hard and durable as it seems, is actually soluble in very hot water and the heat of the magma was more than enough to dissolve the quartz and other minerals which then followed the cracks and faults in the rock along the edges of the intrusion forming massive deposits of quartz and other minerals some of which are of gem quality.Plainfield MA. is on the western edge of the intrusion and there is a place called the Bett’s Mine where many gem quality stones are found.
Just West of Fare Thee Well is the Chester State Forest which has loads of Pegmatite and Quartz and Beryl crystals like the ones in the pictures above.

Then we have Fare Thee Well which sits on the Southern locus of the massive intrusion, which by the way, looks like a cat’s eye with Fare Thee Well on the lowermost corner of the vertical eye.
Quartz voluminously boiled out of the Earth along faults and cracks including a large one that crosses Fare Thee Well.
Much like what happens with hot springs with their incredible deposition of intricate and beautiful stone shapes and terraces also happened all along the fault at Fare Thee Well and there are now enormous quartz boulders that formed in the cracks with just the tops now showing above the ground.
Quartz is very hard and tough to crack and resisted even the grinding pressure of over a mile of ice from the glaciers that once covered the ground.
What you see now with the quartz, was there before the time of Dinosaurs and in fact may have been there before the time of the first animals of any kind walked the Earth.
Four Hundred Million Years is a very long time but we can touch crystals that are that old at Fare Thee Well and that is a wonderful thing.

Next week: Crystal Energy and Life!

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