A late winter

Winter 2007-2008 Winter had come and it was time to do some additional research on the Havey. The advent of the internet is a wonderful thing. I was able to start to track down some of the articles that had been printed about the mine. Some of the info I sent away for was in books, magazines and newspaper articles. It is much more efficient to sit behind the desk and look up some piece of history than to travel halfway across the country to find a possible paragraph.Of course, at this point in time I haven't been able to find all that I want, but they keep putting new info online and since much of the information I am looking for is from the beginning of the 1900's, it is going to take a while before it is available. Many times in finding one piece of information, it has lead to one or more other leads. My list of potential news sources keeps getting longer instead of shorter.

I had high ambitions of getting in and starting to mine early. Of course mother nature didn't care how eager I was. We had as much snow piled up as I can remember. I brought up the excavator in early March and started pushing the snow out of the road. It was over 4 feet deep in spots. I cleared out enough snow to be able to drive to the mine and turn the truck around. The spring started off cold which didn't help melt the snow. I did push some snow out of the way and this helped a bit. When Frank Perham and Barry Heath were over late last fall they had pointed out several areas that they thought looked promising. They also said that the indicators that I had for finding tourmaline were better than what they were mining at the moment. Why can't that cursed snow melt?

Road to mine. Spring 2008

Since the island area received a lot of sun I cleaned the snow off from it. This would give me a chance to look around it some more while I waited for the snow to melt in the rest of the quarry. There are some interesting indicators here, but I didn't find much. Since I had some time to kill I continued work on cleaning off the western part of the quarry as it also was getting the spring sun. This part of the Havey hadn't seen any work for almost 100 years. It would be interesting to see what they had buried.

Mid March 2008...looking across a corner of the Berry mine into the Havey

 Before I could make much progress I needed to get the excess material out of the mine.To kill two birds with one stone I decided to take the smaller material that was in the mine and use it to help build up my road into the mine. The road was fine when it was dry but it would rut up during the wet seasons. There was also the issue of water running down the road. I put in several culverts and built most of the road up a foot. There were only a couple of areas that had some minor problems at this point but it was good enough for a mine road. When I have more material there will be quite a bit more work I can do to help improve it. Being an excavation contractor I have high expectations of having a good access road. If any of you have driven into some of the quarries you know what a rough ride is. Some of this is for bragging rights on who has the worst road to their mine, and, of course, miners had much rather be mining than repairing roads.