Scattering the Purple Apatite.

Summer 2010 It was decided that a small trench would be blasted through the mineralized zone to try and see what was going on. The dangers of doing this is not knowing what you might be blowing up. I tried to pick a spot that looked the least promising and did some drilling. While drilling you can watch the drill cuttings and get some idea of what you are drilling through, although at times it is hard to distinguish what you are exactly drilling. Things like muscovite,  schorl, and lepidolite are fairly easy to identify. It gets harder to try and figure out the different types of feldspar or mixtures with quartz  Most of the time the closer you are to the mineralized zone the quicker the rock drills. Of course everyone whether a miner or not dreams of the drill suddenly dropping as it falls into a pocket.

Dog Days of summer

In trying to blast through the mineralized zone I had a couple of blast that the bottom didn't come out as expected. This can be a nuisance as even though it has been blasted, sometimes it is loose under the surface but it didn't fracture the top. Doing additional blasting in the same area usually produces poor results as the area has already been fractured so the gas from the blast just expands into the fractures instead of blowing the rock out. Using a track drill can have it's drawbacks, while it makes easy work of the drilling, getting the drill to where I need to drill can be tedious. With the failure of the the last two blast to move the rock I wanted and the area fractured underneath I decided to blast in some solid rock on the other side of the hole that I had been working. Although I wanted to move the drill to an area less then 10' from where I had been drilling,  it would involve a tremendous amount of work since I had no way to get the drill there. I would have to take the drill out of the quarry cut some trees and blast in a new access to get where I wanted. It ended up taking almost two months for me to do this. Even though it was a lot of work it was work that I would have had to do as some point. It is just frustrating that in the heart of the mining season that I have to do a major change at the mine. There is nothing easy about mining but it is very exciting when you are in the zone.

After finally getting set up to drill, I drilled and blasted into some vuggy blue albite. This can be the home of apatites. I had already found a few before the blast in some of the vugs. After the blast I would find quite a few more but of course they were spread all over the opposite embankment. Most of these crystals were small in the 1/16" to 1/8" size but I did find a couple in the 1/4" size that were very nice. Mr. Apatite, Don Dallaire ended up with the best of these at a later point in time. Some of the rock hounds with Poland mining camps scoured the embankment for weeks looking for remnants that I missed.

Photo by Ray Sprague of a cluster of purple apatites that came out of this area

photo by Don Dallaire Close up view of  a purple apatite. This is in the collection of Donald Dallaire and is approximately 5mm across

Jim Nizamoff checking out the vuggy blue albite and Toot with a stick. Imagine that.

salamander looking for a place to hide in the vuggy albite

mineralized zone on the edge of the blast

Finally the blast went well and took out the rock that I wanted. I had a nice clean hole with a vertical face to work. I was set to be able to move some rock now. I was doing a series of blast  revealing the edge of the mineralized zone but this did not produce anything else of interest. Another area of blue vuggy albite showed up and even though there was some fairly large vugs nothing was found except for a few small quartz. After working this bench all the way to the wall it was time to move the drill back and start the next bench and hope something shows up.