Spring 2011 I had decided on changing the route for access to the bottom of the mine. This would involve removing a fair amount of ledge and this would enable me to lengthen out the road into the mine, therefore making for a shallower slope. I had a set date for this as a couple of different groups were scheduled to do field trips in the next month or so and I wanted the mine ready for them which would involve removing the rock that had been blasted through the winter and early spring.. Woody Thompson who was the man behind the Maine Mineral Symposium wanted a preview of the mine before the Symposium field trip to go over logistics. We set up a time to to get together and go over things. I was hoping to not take to long as I wanted to do a blast after he left. We got talking about different things one in particular was that they always seemed to find the good stuff at the mine he was visiting after he left. By the time he left even though I had the holes drilled there was not enough time to do the blast. This was a little frustrating as this immediately put me behind schedule for getting in the new access. I headed up to the mine early the next day and did the blast and decided since I was behind I would double the size of the next blast to get back on schedule. In drilling for the next blast near the bottom of a couple of the drill holes I ran into some quartz and then some water. I thought this might be a quartz pocket but didn't expect much as I thought that I was quite a bit above the mineralized zone. I put some stemming(this is small rock that we use to keep the blast confined) in the bottom of the hole, and in using this I was hoping to keep the blast from going in the bottom of the holes in case there was a pocket there. The blast went off fine and I did a quick look of the blast before packing up for the day. We had a Maine Mineralogical and Geological Society meeting and I needed to leave the mine early to get to the meeting on time.
The next morning I headed up to the mine to further investigate the blast. I got the pump out and started washing the blast pile down. After the blast everything is covered with rock dust so it can be very difficult to identify anything. Aside from cleaning the rock off, the water helps bring out any color that might be present. In one area I started to notice some gem tourmaline fragments. This was both a good and bad sign. Was this the remnants of the tourmaline pocket and did I blast it literally to pieces. The blast was fairly well contained which would mean that even though I had debris scattered for 30+ feet, if there was something blasted out it should be relatively easy to find. If the blast does not get sent to far you can typically follow where the material originated from. I concentrated on the area where the fragments were and washed away material for an hour or more just finding some additional small shards of tourmaline but it was leading me back to where the pocket was. After digging and removing loose rock for another hour I finally came to the remnants of the tourmaline pocket. There were a couple of large pieces of tourmaline laying in the kaolin on top of the pocket area. The Havey to date has not been know for it's extremely large crystals Getting some the size of your thumb is about as large as they get but this is nothing to scoff at. The larger crystals have a tendency to have more internal flaws, where the smaller material can be exceptional clean and make for some gorgeous gemstones.
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| An area of kaolin. Above this was some quartz crystals and below it would be the tourmaline. |
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| Some of the first tourmaline to come out of the pocket. |
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It had been awhile coming but it was well worth the effort.
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| Photo by Jan Morrison Me working the pocket. |
As I continued to work the pocket it had two distinct areas, one side had absolutely no damage from the blast and this area had smoky quartz crystals still on the top. They were loosened from the blast so I was able to just pull them out. The quality of the smokies weren't that great but this was a tourmaline pocket and tourmaline was king in this pocket. Digging down there was a large mass of kaolin and you could stick your hand into the kaolin and pull out tourmaline. As I continued to work this section water kept seeping in and dissolving the kaolin, as this happened when you stuck your hand into the thin soup and felt around you could pull out a handful of almost solid tourmaline. Much of the tourmaline was broken into segments but there were a fair amount of crystals although most only had one end that was terminated. Some of the tourmaline was heavily included and some was opaque but there where many pieces that where inclusion free. The other side of the pocket did not have nearly as much kaolin or as much tourmaline although there was a fair amount and some of this was attached to some of the quartz faces in the bottom of the pocket. This pocket was starting to turn into the real deal. It had been a long time coming and I was just soaking in the enormity of it all. I had spent countless hours drilling and blast, removing excess rock, hammering on promising looking rock and here was what I had been looking for. The Havey had been "the tourmaline mine" 100 years ago and had hardly produced anything since that era of mining ended.
There are stories of people calling all of their friends and mining acquaintances when they hit the big find, I didn't do that, I called my wife and just a couple of other people as I wanted to just enjoy the moment without a bunch of people running around. To date I had done 99% of the work myself and it was nice to be me, the mine and the tourmaline.
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| A tourmaline crystal in the matrix |
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| A bountiful pocket. Photo taken late in the day so the color is not showing up real well. |
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| photo by Raymond Sprague |
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| photo by Raymond Sprague |
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| photo by Raymond Sprague |
Needless to say my schedule to get the new access road into the mine would need to be put on hold. As I write this almost two years after the discovery off this pocket I am finally doing the blasting needed to lengthen out the the way to the bottom of the quarry although with other work that has been done since them I am not sure if it will get used for this. The primary reason of removing the rock now is to get access to the mineralized area in hopes of additional pockets. To be continued....
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