Florida is the lightning capital of the United States, and the Lake Wales Ridge is a long spine of deep, clean quartz sand running down the middle of the peninsula - the two ingredients a fulgurite needs, in the same place, at scale. The commercial sand pits along the ridge in Polk County are where the scientifically described specimens have come from: pit walls and working faces cut through the sand column and expose tubes in cross-section, which is how their branching structure came to be measured properly rather than guessed at. These are ACTIVE PRIVATE MINES. There is no public collecting here and no casual access. It is on the map because it is where the record actually is, and because a working pit is a place to ask permission, not to walk onto.
Fulgurite (lightning glass)
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
