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