Country Rock Contact

Winter 2009 I feel sorry for not following up sooner. This is suppose to be winter 2011-2012, in reality we had very little winter so I have been working at the mine through what should be winter. This leaves little time for writing. I will try and catch up shortly but mining is my passion and writing does not come close.

Although mining alone is great therapy it is nice to see fellow rock enthusiast occasionally, although it does have a tendency to slow down production. Terry Szenics whom I purchased the Havey mine from and Ray Woodman stopped by for a visit. Both are very knowledgable about Maine mining and have some very interesting stories to share about their past mining and mineral adventures. With Terry living in the New York area and owning a mine in Maine, it made it hard to work so he decided to sell and I ended up being the lucky individual who bought the Havey. Terry mined the Havey back around 1976 blasting and removing about 1800 yds of material. Removing this rock sure made my job a lot easier when it came time to start moving rock. He had made a nice trench for me to be able to work off from. Terry has had many mining successes in his lifetime of mining including a significant find of purple apatites at the Pulsifer quarry at Mount Apatite, which is only about a mile as the crow flies away from the Havey. Ray Woodman a retired State of Maine geologist had what many considered one of if not the best collection of Maine minerals which has gone to the Maine Mineral Museum which should open in 2012 in Bethel. Ray had purchased some of the specimens that Terry had found during his mining episode at the Havey including  some cinnamon colored tourmaline. I was envious. I guess I will just have to do some more mining and hopefully there are more cinnamon tourmaline crystals left.

Ray Woodman and Terry Szenics visit the mine. Ray may not be as spry as he used to be but he is still keeps his ear to the ground on what is going on in the Maine mining community. Terry liked the "new drill".

Terry Szenics in the bottom of the quarry

As the temperatures cooled down I gave up on trying to work the mineralized zone and switched over to improving my access. As I was going deeper chasing the core zone it was necessary to lower the access road into the mine so that I could get the machinary in with some relative ease and not have too steep a grade. In reality this meant that I needed to blast the wall back. One good thing was that the ledge was slowly dropping so even though the mineralized zone was sloping down, the grade was sloping down with it but not as steep of an angle. With the grade sloping down it would make getting down to the mineralized zone easier. In doing this work I started to come in contact with the country rock(rock formation that surrounds the pegmatite), in this case it is mostly gneiss. Many places in this area the glaciers have removed most of the country rock and left the harder pegmatite in place. As the top of the ledge slowly drops I am running into the country rock on top of the pegmatite. This can be somewhat problematic with blasting, in certain areas of the contact, the country rock has decomposed and there is a void between the top rock types. Much of the energy of the blast if allowed to will escape into this void and little rock will be moved.

contact between the country rock and pegmatite

An interesting area of schorl that was uncovered on the north side of the quarry

a promising area

a pocket is just below and behind the dendrites

Remnants of a herderite pocket. Compare with photo above

A warm spell in December means the ability to get in another day of mining in the mineralized area. You need to be quick and with the daylight ending early it means you might need to work under lights. If you wait too long, things may be snowed over and this makes it very difficult. Ray Sprague and I opened this pocket up late one afternoon only to come back the next day to not only cold but a light coating of snow. As it was getting late in the year it was time to give up and start thinking about spring.