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.