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