Tourmaline Crystals

Fall 2009 After the quartz pocket more blasting was done. A large feldspar crystal showed up, with one area being very orange with dendrites. I very good sign. The feldspar was very fractured and I was able pull the feldspar apart with the hammer and chisel. I quickly broke into a pocket that was full of kaolin. Kaolin is a soft white clay found inside many pockets and very easy to dig through. Inside the kaolin I could feel a quartz crystal. As I dug through the kaolin the crystal kept increasing in size until it was roughly 20cm in diameter. Where this crystal was totally enclosed in kaolin I got excited thinking it would be beautiful and flawless. Although encased in the kaolin it was slow work digging it out It probably took 30 minutes to dig all around it so that it was free to be removed from its home for the last 300 million years. Upon being removed from the pocket and washed off, although it had little damage, it was not the beautiful smoky that I was hoping for. Going back into the pocket some additional quartz crystals came out and then as I dug deeper into the kaolin I pulled out my first tourmaline crystal. It had been a long time coming but at this moment it was well worth it. It was the typical Havey greenish blue. Tourmaline is dichroic meaning looking through the crystal sideways it is one color and looking through the end it is another color. This can make it a challenge to cut for gemstones as there will be a mixture of the two colors in the cut stone. The Havey tourmaline is blessed with having great color in both directions in the a,b axis it is a greenish blue(teal) and looking down the c axis or end it is a mint green with no olive color to dull it down. This gives a very unique and desirable color to the cut stones and many of the cut stones will be eye clean.

I was able to keep removing the feldspar  away from the pocket so as to have good access. Of course at this point I did not have my camera so no  pictures of this pocket were taken. I have found that cameras and mining are a tough fit with all the rock, grit, water, and delicate moving parts on the camera. I seem to go through a fair amount of them. This turned out to be a small pocket with only a few terminated crystals and only a small amount of gem rough. In the bottom where a few matrix specimens with the tourmaline in cookeite. Hopefully this was just a taste of things to come.

photo by Raymond Sprague My first tourmaline crystals. The largest is approximately 6cm x .7cm

photo by Raymond Sprague Terminated crystals

photo by Raymond Sprague

photo by Raymond Sprague Tourmaline in cookeite

Finding the tourmaline is definitely one of the reasons that I was mining. It is very exciting to pull these rare crystals out of the ground and be the first person to see them. When Havey was mining in 1910 he hit several pockets that summer and fall. Many spectacular crystals came out of those pockets, the largest measuring 3.5cm x 15cm. The larger tourmaline crystals have a tendency to have many fractures and inclusions with many of the smaller being very clean. I had visions of finding more and figuring with the modern mining that I was doing, versus what Havey had in 1910  it should be relatively easy for me to find. How wrong this thought would turn out to be. I continued to move rock late into the end of the year with no more gem tourmaline to be found.

Fall Mining

Fall 2009 Mining in the fall is great. There are no bugs, the temperature and humidity are very comfortable and ground conditions are still fairly dry so it is easy to keep ahead of the water. The down side is winter is coming but there isn't much we can do about that. After exploring more around the small tourmaline area without much results it was time to move on which meant more blasting. I still had quite a bit of mineralized area to work through so I had high hopes of finding more tourmaline. Of course where I was blasting through the mineralized zone it meant that the blast would need to be small so as to hopefully not damage anything interesting. After I couple of blast I found an area that turned out to be what I refer to as classic Havey quartz pocket. As you start to approach the pocket the quartz and or feldspar is very fractured. On the outside edge of the pocket you can remove the feldspar and quartz with your bare hands. As you work further into the pocket there is a layer of cleavelandite. Inside the layer of cleavelandite you will start to find the quartz crystals. If you are at the top of  the pocket they are typically smoky. Toward the bottom they become a light citrine to clear. At the Havey many of these pockets have a false bottom and if you break through the massive quartz layer in the bottom you are apt to find some additional pocket material. In this pocket as I broke through the bottom there were a few apatite crystals hiding out.

The beginning of a large quartz pocket. You can see the fractures at the top of the pocket. The contents of the pocket can be removed by hand at this point although as you near the bottom of the pocket it can get hard and some hammering will need to get done to get it out.

first quartz crystal of the pocket

Although this pocket was the largest that I had found up to this point most of the specimens were mediocre. The smokies were light and mostly broken. There were some micro quartz crystals in a few areas. There were a few good light citrine quartz crystals that I will get some pictures of at a later point. The pocket was about .75meters wide x .75meters long x 1.25 meters deep. Even though the quality of the crystals was not great it was still interesting to see what the pocket held.

Light smoky quartz with an iron staining that came off fairly easily

photo by Raymond Sprague  Some of the ugly quartz crystals that came out of the bottom of the pocket

Some apatite that came out of the bottom of the pocket.

Schorl with a tourmaline rim in feldspar. This was not associated with the quartz pocket. 

Highly mineralized area

First Gem Tourmaline

Summer 2009  It is a little frustrating to be mining for tourmaline and not have anything to show if someone should ask. At this point I had found a fair amount of tourmaline specimens frozen in quartz and there was much of it in the muscovite books but I didn't have any crystals that had come from a pocket. There has been much written about the tourmaline from the Havey how it has a beautiful unique bluish green color, and how clear it is. I wanted to find some and the other treasures that might be hidden with it. There were also stories about how the Havey was all played out. This had concerned me some when I had originally thought of buying it, but there had been some recent finds in the Berry and some of those were pretty close to the Havey quarry. The Berry and Havey quarry are the same pegmatite and the mineralized zone that I am working has been worked extensively on the Berry side. The only thing separating the two quarries is the property line.  I thought it was worth a try mining the Havey and with the mineralization that was being exposed I felt pretty confident that something would show up. It was just going to be a matter of moving more rock. The more I read and started to understand what was going on, the more confident I felt. Every blast was revealing more of the core zone and its complexities, and, of course, there was more tourmaline showing up...but I was hoping for better quality.

As I started to clean out from the last blast I could see some small pieces of green. I was very quick to hop out of the excavator and see what was down there. It turned out to be some small pieces of gemmy tourmaline. The excavator was shut off and the hand work started. It was a little frustrating to know that the one spot that I chose to blast through the mineralized area would end up being the area that had a tourmaline pocket. As I slowly worked my way through the rubble, an area of kaolin started to show up. As I washed this area down, fractured tourmaline crystals frozen in the matrix started to show up. The kaolin turned out to be void of any crystals and overall, even though it was the first pocket to have some gem tourmaline, the pocket did not produce much but some small shards and small specimen pieces most of these in a lepidolite like matrix. Expanding on this area didn't reveal much else in the way of any pockets or tourmaline although it still looks interesting. Some of this area is as close as I want to work toward the Berry Quarry as I am lower than the pond on the other side of the property line and I would like the water to stay on that side.

Working my way blasting through the mineralized zone the next interesting area was some morganite crystals showing up in the massive areas of lepidolite. Some of the crystals were pink on one end and a light blue on the other. The Havey quarry is not well known for gem beryl but with all that is showing up I would assume at some point in time that some will be found. Behind the lepidolite masses there was some quartz and in one area there was some voids. These were not the typical pocket structure but there was some spaces and they were filled with some beautiful smoky quartz. Much of this came out in pieces but there were several nice specimens that came out.

A void in the quartz where some smokies formed 

Photo by Raymond Spraque Smoky from the void



Morganite in with Lepidolite. Montebrasite with the rust colored rind. Otto's tail for scale.

  

white kaolin with pieces of tourmaline in the bottom of the pocket



close up of kaolin and tourmaline pieces



Otto RIP 7/03/02-7/23/11

Otto fall 2009

Mineralized Bench

Manchurian Warrior

Spring 2009 With winter hanging on and anxious to get some blasting done the excavator was brought up to move some of the snow aside. Where I am not mining up in the mountains like many of the miners I can get an earlier start than most of them. Many of the mines in Maine are up in the foothills and mountains of Oxford county and can have many more feet of snow than what the Havey gets, plus some of the mines have long tough access roads which can be difficult to traverse in the summer so it is very tough for them to get much of an early jump on spring. It was mid march and the days were starting to warm up, so after the snow was moved from the area to be worked what little remained melted quickly. The first blast of the new season went off and the Havey was up and running. I felt very positive that we would be finding some interesting minerals in the near future. I had some great looking areas to work and many words of encouragement of how promising things looked. It took several more blast to get to the depth that I needed and to edge of the quartz pod area. As the quartz pod was reached and shook up I brought out the hammer drill and did some serious hammering. There was an albite cleavelandite rind around this area which was relatively soft so hammering out material was fairly easy although in reality I didn't move much rock. On the edge of the quartz I continued to find some tourmaline fans and some of these came out in some fairly good size pieces. Most of this tourmaline is fairly light colored and has altered more to a clay than tourmaline. As I exhausted the area that I could work with the hammer I put in another blast. 

Tourmaline fan

Photo by Raymond A. Sprague  Watermelon Tourmaline recovered after a blast 2cm x 12cm 

This blast opened up the mineralized zone with several large areas of lepidolite and several large areas of quartz.There was also some large blocky feldspar. Several phosphate pods showed up. These are good areas to look for rare and or even unknown minerals, although the ones that were showing up here had mostly been altered. Many of these as far as I am concerned are grouped in the uglier than sin category but to each his own. This area was almost 20' long and looked extremely promising. This was all happening as the same to that the Maine Pegmatite Workshop was taking place and the group stopped by for a visit to explore the pegmatite. As the mineralized zone was running into the bottom of the quarry it was the general consensus from several of the experts that the hole needed to be deeper. That seems to be a common theme in that all you need to do is go deeper and there it will be. It is not quite as easy as it sounds. Some of these pegmatites don't like to give up there depths to blasting very easily.                        

Photo by Alexander U. Falster   Workshop participants working on the mineralized zone

Photo by Alexander U. Falster   Skip Simmons and Frank Perham discussing the practicality of growing some of those Louisiana crawfish in the pond at the Havey. Frank is concerned about them hiding in the pockets and someone getting bit.

After the peg workshop left it was time to move forward. With all the mineralization showing and it looking promising, a decision was made to try and do a cut through the mineralized zone and then loosen it with a blast from the back side. I knew I would need to go deeper at some point but I was a little anxious to see what may be hidden behind all the mineralization. It was difficult to choose a spot as it all looked promising for potential pockets. The spot was chosen and blasting through the zone started. Several small blast were done in trying to reach the backside of the mineralized zone. 

Blasting finally starts

Late fall 2008 . Around the same time as I was working the large mass of quartz and finding the pockets the old air track drill showed up. This machine is an antique but the price was right and for the amount of drilling I would be doing it would work fine. The drill hadn't been used in over 10 years so it was in need of some tlc. A few hoses needed to be replaced and I took the hammer apart and cleaned it up. I did some general service work on the compressor and then it was up and running. Many of the miners in Maine are drilling with a hand drill and compressor. This is hard work and some what slow, where I was a one man show and had a fair amount of rock to move using the air track seemed like the correct route to go. I found out that as long as you had good going and a relatively level area to work the air track worked well but there are times due to some steep slopes or access is that it is much more challenging. I need to make a road every where that it needs to go and there is constant moving of the air hose(bull hose). They don't call it the bull hose for nothing as it needs to get bulled around and it is not very light or manageable.

drilling to help create better access

The frustrating part of doing the first several blast is that it would not benefit me in any way of finding any new mineralized areas. I was doing the blasting to get better access into the mine. This had been a concern from day one and I had devised a plan to start to lower the south east wall to make it easier to get man and machinery in. This was going to be a fair amount of work with no immediate gratification but it would make it much easier to work for the long haul. Also the mineralization was bumping up against this area and some of this rock was going to need be removed in the near future if I wanted to continue and explore the mineralized area.

Remnants of a large blast that was done to create better access into the Havey. The waterhole is in the Berry quarry.

Removing the blast material seen from the Northwest side of the quarry and the access road to it.

I was having a difficult time trying to decide where to start blasting for the mineralized area and not do any damage to any of the potential pockets. I new where I wanted to get to and that would be the quartz pod with all of the tourmaline in the matrix. The areas surrounded it also looked somewhat promising with beryl, large blocky feldspar, schorl to name a few. When I was cleaning up from the blast for lowering the entryway I found a fracture in the ledge and was able to rip up a slab that was probably 15 ton. In doing this it was easy to see that underneath the area of schorl the rock turned to junk. This made it very easy to choose where to start to go down. I would be able to start blasting just se of the basalt dike. The basalt dike typically will stay in place if you blast on one side of it and give a clean wall. This also would keep me far enough away from the quartz pod area so that I would not damage it. Before winter set in drilling was done so that in the spring blasting could start in earnest and hopefully find the tourmaline pocket.

Putting the Havey to rest for the winter 2008

Tourmaline Frozen in the Quartz

Fall 2008 After locating the lepidolite on one side of my access road and the quartz pocket on the other side it was time to see what was under the road. This would mean that I would lose my easy access for awhile. As I started to clean  the material off the ledge a large area of schorl showed up. Schorl is very common in the quarry but not in the volume that it was showing up now.

Plenty of schorl it mixes with green tourmaline closer to the pump. The green tourmaline is poor quality and very crumbly. You can see a split in the basalt dike right behind the pump.

 After the schorl area as I was raking the excavator teeth across the bottom of the remaining pile Rod Stone showed up to see what was going on and hollered for me to stop digging. He jumped down in the hole and pulled out a couple pieces of opaque watermelon tourmaline. Shutting off the excavator and going to work with a shovel and the hose we started to clean off the area. A pod of quartz started to show up with opaque tourmaline crystals frozen in the quartz. This was very exciting. I had seen seeing hints of tourmaline occasionally but most of it was in muscovite in some of the loose boulders but this was what it is all about. Even though it opaque there was green, pink and watermelon. Also on the edge of the quartz pod was a large area of purple lepidolite. There was a lot of different colors concentrated in this one small area.

Tourmaline mass frozen in quartz

I cut out the tourmaline mass above and was rewarded with this tourmaline fan on the back side. Photo area represents 25cm x 25cm.

After carefully cleaning off the area It was time again to get the hammer drill out and start chipping away at the quartz to see what might be hidden from view. I was expecting with each blow that it would break through into a pocket. This quartz was fairly solid and didn't have too many fracture lines in it. As I continued to break away the quartz I found an area with cookeite and got more excited. My experience with the quartz pocket had shown that the cookeite would lead me to the pocket. Following the cookeite led to a small opening that was filled with kaolin and many small smoky quartz crystals. I was hoping that the pocket would open up and there would be  some tourmaline in the bottom but alas this didn't happen.

An overview of the quartz pod. You can see the tourmaline fan that was below the tourmaline mass in the above picture.

Above is the small smoky quartz pocket that I mentioned earlier and then above that was a montebrasite crystal that I was trying to get out in one piece. Luckily for me as I continued to work on removing the quartz around it, the crystal broke into several pieces and there was a surprise inside. If you expand the above picture you will be able to see some small tourmaline crystals in the frozen in the quartz. I continued to work this area off and on to the end of the season without finding much more. I was going to need to blast to make any real headway in finding what was hidden below.

First Quartz Pocket

Late summer 2008. After finding the lepidolite area I would have liked to continue to clean the ledge off but this was my only access in to the mine. As mentioned previously the old access through the Berry mine was no longer an option. Getting into the mine a different way from the access I was using would be very difficult. Since I had exhausted the possibility of finding a pocket in the lepidolite area without blasting and since some of the participants from The Pegmatite Workshop mentioned the prospects on the further side of the mine I decided to do some work on cleaning the ledge off on the nw side. Since most of the trees had been cut earlier this year much of the work involved removing the material that had been dumped there decades before. The material was hauled out of the mine and this area was washed down. It showed some promise with several areas of quartz. When things were wet in this area you could see a glazing of lepidolite on the feldspar. There were several small areas of lepidolite and another are that looked like the bottom of a pocket. I decided after seeing what the prospects were on this side of the mine and the difficulty in working this side that I would abandon it for now and go back and work where I had been originally.

quartz area from the northwest side of the quarry

Back to narrowing up my access road. This time I chose the opposite side and after moving some material a large area of quartz started to show up. This was encouraging at least to me as it was the largest mass of quartz I had seen in the Havey since I had started. It had been mentioned that quartz was an good sign so I took some time and did a closer look. I could see some cookeite and it was time to bring out the hammer drill and start breaking apart the quartz to see if there was any hidden treasures inside. It was breaking apart pretty good and then the hammer broke through into a pocket and things slowed down. I put the big hammer away and then started to approach the area with a little more tenderness. As I slowly enlarged the opening and reached my hand in I could feel the smooth crystal face of the crystal. Pulling out the lose quartz and feldspar that was around it I finally pulled out my first smoky quartz crystal from a pocket. It was very exciting. The remainder of the pocket contained a mixture of quartz shards, feldspar, cookeite, and muscovite pieces. There was also some milky quartz and several more poorly formed smokies. This pocket turned out to be about the size of a volley ball.

Quartz area with cookeite. Surrounded by feldspar and schorl

When working in these pockets they have a tendency to be packed with different materials. These quartz pockets all had about the same make up as listed above. When working in the pocket it is nice to do it without gloves so that you can feel the crystals although this leads to some pretty nasty cuts. The quartz can have razor sharp edges. Sometimes you won't know you have been cut until you look down and wonder what all the pretty red rock is. In the pockets much of the material is packed in very solidly so it can be quite a bit of work to get out some of it especially in one piece. Many of the pieces in the pockets have fractures or are broken. Sometimes you are able to match up the broken pieces and put them back together. The best a crystal looks is when it is fresh from the pocket. Most of the pocket material that comes out of the Havey is very clean meaning a rinse in the water and you get a good view of what it will look like. Some mines leave a heavy coating of iron or other material on the  crystals.

One of the first quartz pockets. You can see the beginning of a smoky quartz crystal in the hole on the left. Notice the contact with the feldspar and quartz. 

This particular area of quartz I worked off and on over a couple of months. There were several more pockets that had some nice smokies.Almost all of these pockets had one nice smoky at the top(although sometimes it would be heavily damaged and then would have a mixture as listed above. Along with the pockets there were many small vugs that would hold a crystal or two although these were usually smaller crystals. There were many crystal faces along the seems that were discarded because of the poor quality. Some of the smokies had a clear apatite druse covering parts of the crystal faces. Below are a couple of smoky quartz that came out of the first quartz pod.

two views of the same smoky quartz crystal
overall dimensions are 16cm x 12cm

two views of the same same smoky quartz crystal
overall dimensions are 9cm x 10cm
note: clear apatite druse on bottom crystal

Turkey Troubles

Spring 2008. The turkeys are coming! The turkeys are coming! There are many farm fields that surround the Havey so it is a common occurence to see turkeys. You can tell that they visit the mine occasionally because of the stray feathers that they leave. Once in a while you will see them on the way in and sometimes, if there are no engines running, you can hear them gobbling. This spring a mother hen decided to make her nest right beside the road to the mine, so every time anyone went in or out she would crouch down so to camouflage herself. If you didn't know right where to look she was hard to find. She did nest far enough away so that while I was working I did not disturb her. Finally, coming in one day most of the eggs were hatched is she and her brood were gone.

The turkeys have left the area.

 Now that the bulk of the excess material was out of the mine I could continue cleaning up the remaining area and see where the best place would be to start mining. Of course I needed access into the mine for the equipment, so this meant that there was a certain amount of area that I would not be able to look at as easily. The pegmatite workshop had asked to come to the mine so I wanted to expose and clean off as much ledge as possible. I am still  new at this and can use some knowledgable eyes to look and give me some direction. As it turned out the most promising areas so far were to be under the road. As I kept narrowing up the road I was able to remove a fair amount of loose rock. The last time the Havey was mined in the mid 1970's Terry Szenics was having a loader come in and remove the loose rock. While using this machine was optimal at the time, it was not able to rip all of the fractured rock that may have still been bound together after the blast. Now, using an excavator equipped with a ripper tooth I was able to tear down through an additional 1' to 3' of loosened  rock. In doing this I was exposing some new ground that hadn't been seen.

Access ramp into the mine. Note the basalt dike on the left hand side of the picture.

All of a sudden some 10 to 20lb blocks of purple lepidolite started to come up. Much of the lepidolite from the Havey is a fine grained purple and takes an excellent polish. It was time to take a closer look. I didn't always have a camera handy and this was one of those times. There was a lot of cleavelandite beside the lepidolite and upon closer inspections in some of the vugs (small open spaces in the rock) there were some small quartz crystals. If you go by what the books say, things were looking mighty fine.Yes, I was excited. As I slowly cleaned off the area the lepidolite mass kept growing in size until it was over 3' long. There was montebrasite, muscovite, beryl, quartz, and the lepidolite that went from purple to green. This was the place to be. The electric hammerdrill came out in hopes of finding a pocket, but it was not meant to be. I covered it up at the end of the day and although I would expose it periodically I would not mine this exact area for another 16 months.

The first large mass of lepidolite that I exposed at the Havey. Montebrasite at the top right of the greenish lepidolite.
Two rock hounds not having much luck finding the tourmaline.

Shortly after finding the lepidolite mass, the folks from the Pegmatite Workshop showed up. There were between 30 and 40 people with many varied interests. From novices who knew less than I up through some with doctorates in their field of study. It was interesting to listen to some of the scientific debate on the geology of what is going on at the Berry-Havey quarry. Aside from the area I was working, it was pointed out again that some areas on the opposite side of the quarry looked promising for pocket formation. Listening to some of the different ideas  it emphasized the more you know the more you realize you don't know.

Mining for Feldspar

Think for a minute what it must have been like when they were mining the Havey back in the early 1900's. There were no dump trucks or excavators or air drills that they were using. It was mostly manual labor. At the Havey he had a crew of 10 Italian laborers working the mine for feldspar (feldspar is the coating that is on porcelain fixtures and china plates). They were drilling by hammering a steel drill bit and turning it a quarter turn with each hit. I don't know how long this took to drill a hole but I am sure it was just this side of forever. After the blast, the material was broken up with hammers and put in wheelbarrows and the waste would be piled up out of the way or dumped over an embankment. The feldspar was then loaded and transported approximately 3 miles by horse and wagon to the Littlefield Station in Auburn and ground down and put on train cars. If this was what mining was today I would not be there. With the mechanical help that is available today, the work that I can do by myself on a part time basis is more than their whole crew of ten men could do. If you are interested in finding out more about Maine feldspar production there are several USGS publications available if you do a search under Google's book section.

Miners working for feldspar in the early 1900's location unknown. This would have been very typical of the Havey mine operation.   Photo from The Maine Feldspar Company promotional brochure

A large derrick used for lifting. Probably a pile of feldspar in the foreground.  
Photo from The Maine Feldspar Company promotional brochure

A larger operation with a steam drill. You can also see the basket of material being lifted by the derrick.  
Photo from The Maine Feldspar Company promotional brochure                 

Feldspar has no value in Maine at this point in time even though the product is still used. There are cheaper sources to get it. Many times the miners would avoid the areas where the minerals were because the feldspar was of poorer quality in these areas. If you love Maine minerals and/or gemstones, just be thankful that there was an active feldspar industry up through the 1950's in Maine exposing many of the things that we treasure today. Some of the minerals and gems were just a waste product to the feldspar mining. If not for the feldspar mining, many mineral and gem areas may not have been discovered. People are still finding great things in some of these old abandoned workings.

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.

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