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