Gazing across the expanse of the open-pit mine at Micro-Lite LLC just north of the Woodson-Wilson line, at first all I saw was sand, immeasurable tons of it.
I then had to pause as an immense yellow bulldozer, dirty with grit, rumbled by. I watched in subtle awe, unable to hear my thoughts, as the enormous scoop pivoted, dropping dusty material into a nearby grate.
“So what is it that you want, exactly?” the mine’s foreman had groaned in exasperation, clearly annoyed by the eccentric curiosity-seeker who’d ask to check out the area. Though after a fumbling attempt to explain myself while feigning curiosity about gadgets in the control room, he eventually gave in.
He even half-admitted that he knew why I was there, saying “Yeah, whenever we see something sparkle, we take a look.”
“Do I need a hard hat?” I asked.
“Ugh, I’m sure you’ll be fine,” he grumbled, then hastily jogged away toward a nearby building.
As I depart the mine’s processing area with its enormous rock tumblers turning incessantly, I recall that 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period a volcano began forming beneath this place. And as the nearby machines shook the earth, perhaps I gained some minute sense of that force.
Back in a dinosaur-inhabited world, molten rock bled its way up from a hundred miles below the earth’s crust, spreading like tree branches through fractures in the sediment, collecting in such great volumes as to cause the formation of dome-like hills throughout this area between Buffalo and the little village of Rose.
After noise from the heavy machinery and dozer finally thundered only in the distance and I was able to regain my focus, I noticed something glimmering nearby. I bent down and lifted a chunk of brownish-red material, then crumbled it in my hands.
When the sun’s light reflected just right, I saw it again. Those bronze-colored flakes that look as if a penny had been shredded and dispersed through the rock. The mineral is called peridotite or lamprolite, the residue of magma having cooled and hardened.
This igneous formation is one of the rarest and strangest substances on the planet.
The only other known lamprolite deposit in Kansas, the Rose Dome intrusion, is located just a few miles to the northeast.
In other places where deposits like these exist, such as the Kimberly region in western Australia, diamonds have been found. Murfreesboro, Arkansas, is one such place, home to Crater of Diamonds State Park, where tourists pay a few dollars to try their hand at prospecting for a day.
At Murfreesboro in 1990, a woman named Shirley Strawn found the world-famous Strawn-Wagner Diamond, a colorless, internally flawless stone valued at almost $35,000.
The undiscovered wealth lurking beneath Woodson County may be immeasurable, a seemingly wild supposition, though one geologists from Emporia State University even support.
It was a belief shared by prospectors in the late 1870s, who swarmed the area in droves when it seemed they’d discovered a paradise rich in gold, silver, precious metals and stones, recalling the fervor of the California Gold Rush and sites like Deadwood, South Dakota.
The sandstone that’s morphed into blueish-purple quartzite, which litters the mine floor and dyes the soil an inky hue, must have captured their imaginations as well.
