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.