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.