As the weather improved I was still working on trucking blasted material out of the mine. This time of year calls for some discipline when it warms up and you get a nice day there is the desire to switch direction and work where there is a chance of finding something. Most winters even the short ones are way to long, in the winter there is the need to stay away from the mineralized zone due to freezing temperatures and snow. It is very easy to lose things in the snow and if things freeze it is difficult to separate them. Since I get no sun in the winter even days when it is above freezing brings no relief. I always start doing some work in the mineralized zone before I am ready to work it full time, but I look at this as a reward and break from the tedious work and getting the mine ready for spring. Usually there isn't much to find but it is nice to see some color after looking at the drab colored rock for 3 months or more. The great thing about getting the mine empty is that then I have quite a bit of room for when I blast in the mineralized zone. Blasting in the mineralized zone typically is much smaller blast meaning it takes a while to fill the mine back up. Springtime can bring wet conditions and this year was no exception, we are actually getting more rain than usual. This makes it more difficult to work the lower areas until things dry out.
Mining needs to be very fluid. Yes there is science and past experience that helps you determine where to go, but what you think will happen next, usually will change after some blasting occurs. This is what makes working a pegmatite both frustrating and exciting at the same time. The mineralized zone was changing, it had been very consistent for the last couple of years and all of a sudden there was a major change in the direction. I had been drilling and blasting in a straight line running parallel with the mineralized zone and now I chose to go perpendicular to the direction I had been heading and see if I could intercept where the mineralized zone was going. As I did a couple of blast it seemed that I was making contact with the new direction of the mineralized zone but it still was not doing what I thought it should. In trying to blast beside the mineralized zone the strength of the blast carried over into it loosening up some promising area. After having a slow year last year except for the very end of the season it was nice to be able to get off to a good start with a lot of promising area to work.
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| Digging after the blast in a very promising area. As you can see even though the material from the blast is still in place, the material especially the quartz is very fractured. Seeing some staining on some of the quartz indicates that it had fractures previous to the blast and this could indicate a pocket is present. |
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| Some very light smokies fresh from the pocket. |
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| Some darker smokies out of the same pocket. |
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| Barry Heath and Jim Nizamoff working in the quartz pocket. |
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| Jim can feel the smoky but is having a tough time getting it out. Some of these can be very difficult to remove. |
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| An extraction. Not the best smokie but it is always great to get the first glimpse of something that was formed over 300 million years ago. |
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