Moving in the Excavator

Fall 2007 With the trees cut in the primary area to be worked it was time to bring in the machinary and start to remove the remnants of some of the past mining. The first thing was to get the excavator into the mine. I would need to level out one of the tailings piles and try to make a gradual slope down into the mine. This material was from the early 1900's mining era. Much of the pile actually turned out to be sandy material that would have been overburden.  In some areas of the quarry there is, and was, as much as 10' of overburden before getting to hard ledge. In the early 1900's this would have needed to be taken off with hand shovels and wheel barrows, and moved as short a distance as possible. I did separate out the rock and periodically looked through it to see if they might have missed something, but the pile was barren. It was a rather short process to get the excavator into the mine but it would be a much longer process removing all the existing loose rock out of the mine. After getting access in, one of the first things was to grab the brush with the excavator and haul it out of the mine. The excavator had a thumb, so getting the brush out was a pretty easy process. There were areas that needed to be smoothed out and  I needed to move some of the larger rock out of the way so that I could get to the brush that was piled up throughout the mine. This job went so much easier with equipment.

Sand and glacial till overburden in the Berry Quarry

Next was to start removing all the loose rock that was in the mine. I had figured that there was probably just a small amount of loose rock in the mine, but as I progressed, that didn't seem to be the case at all. In some places the loose material was 5 or 6' deep. With the material this deep it was going to create a large amount of material that would need to be moved out.  I started at one of the farthest points from my access road and started pulling the material toward the access road so that I could haul it out of the mine. At the same time I brought up a pump and started to wash down the areas that I was cleaning off. This would be a slow process, and, as I stated before I didn't know a lot about mining so I was doing a lot of inspecting. One thing about washing is that it brings out the color if there is any. Anytime I hit a piece of lepidolite, beryl, or tourmaline with the water, the color would jump right out. Of course, any of the tourmaline I was finding was of poor quality, with most of it being in muscovite. Still, it was exciting to see. It is exciting to see an area cleaned off, wondering what you will find. I started in an area I call 'the island'; this was an area left over from the Havey mining era. They had a derrick sitting on it at one time, and they had removed material all around it leaving this area high. Washing this area down I started to see areas of  lepidolite, cleavelandite, schorl, beryl, quartz, and feldspar. Upon closer inspection, it looked like the quartz area might be vuggy. This prompted me to bring out the generator and hammer drill to help loosen things up some. I did find a few small quartz crystals and some poorly formed smokies. This was a start. With some of the indicator minerals that were showing, I  was having visions of a tourmaline pocket next... but that was to be a while in coming.

Finally I had a good portion of the area washed down. I gave the godfather of Maine pegmatites, Frank Perham, a call to see if he would come over and give me some pointers. He showed up with his mining partner, Barry Heath, and took a tour. Frank has been around pegmatites his whole life, with his father starting the world famous mineral store, Perham's of Maine. Frank had been around in the mid 1970's when the Havey had been worked and was aware of what had transpired at the time. Rumor has it Frank may have even told Havey where to put in a blast or two in 1910.

I continued to wash and explore, but it was getting late in the year. The area of the mine where I have been working does not get very much sun during the winter hours. With nights well below freezing and the day time highs only getting near 40ºF, it was time to call it a season. I didn't have a tremendous amount to show for it, but a lot was learned and I had another year to look forward to when, hopefully, the Havey would start producing pockets of wonderful crystal specimens.

Photo by Encar Roda Robles.       Frank Perham and I, heavy in discussion