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