| Author's
note:
This
morning, August
13, 2005,
I have pledged to myself that I will
not leave my basement office until I have started and finished this
update. To the
regular visitors to this website, I apologize for the extended lapse.
Please be
confident that the paucity of fresh updates does not reflect idle and
rusting
equipment at Mt. Mica.
In fact, the opposite is true. So much so, that I have nearly abandoned
my day
job… in the flesh but not in the spirit. It was during these asides to Florida
that I would discharge my frustrated mining tensions by writing
updates. Therefore,
I ask that you overlook the dangling participles, run on sentences,
and other
atrocities perpetrated against the written word as I force out this
update. Enough
said….
We
resumed working at Mt. Mica
March 15th. Needless to say, although we were hot to get
started, the
weather was not. Our first act was to punch through the
ice with our excavator
bucket and commence pumping. Once the water was out, we dug and trucked
out the
ice. To our surprise in two days we were ready to start mining.
As
noted in previous updates, we had temporarily switched
from open cast mining to underground work. Two years prior, we had
received our
MSHA required 40 hours of training from Jim Clanin, the well known San Diego and Africa
gem miner. Jim is a geologist and mining engineer and has extensive
underground
experience working for gem. I had reached an agreement with Jim to join
Coromoto Minerals, LLC but he would not be arriving in Maine
until early April. In the interim Richard and I decided to take up
where we had
left off in January when we were frozen out.
Our initial effort at Mt. Mica
to work underground had led us to pocket 27, a small gem pocket, and
the 6m
fabulous pocket 28-4. What struck us was the intensification of the
mineralization as we worked toward 28. The amount of lepidolite and
spodumene
was more than we had seen out in the pit. Since there was so much in
the walls
of the adit, we decided to drill a number of exploratory holes in the
‘sweet
spot’ above the garnet. On the up strike (East) side of our adit we did
in fact
drill into a small pocket. Our final effort in  January
was to open this pocket
but the weather intervened before we could properly complete this task.
We
started 2005 mining at this spot by starting a drift eastward.
The pocket we started opening in January was designated
MMP1-05. Although we did open bushel basket sized cavity, the small
amount of
gem elbaite we found with this pocket was contained within a small
satellite
vug about .3 meters below the main cavity. (In the
image to the left Cal Graeber sits on a cold January day beside the
hole we drilled into pocket MMP1-05. The water leaking from the pocket
formed an icicle. This is also the point where we started our drift
Leonard Himes Photo)
As we continued advance our drift, our strategy was to drill
a 1m square burn pattern a safe distance abovet the mineralized zone.
Once the
burn was cut, we would then enlarge this opening to the final width of
the
drift but still keeping the bottom of the opening well above the pocket
zone.
We learned quickly that if we found the ‘roots’ of large accumulations
of
schorls showing in the floor of our cut, we could predict with a degree
of
certainty that a pocket was underneath. This was especially true if
there was a
halo of quartz and cleavelandite around the schorls. As we worked the
mineralized zone with sinker holes, we would place these in such a way
as to carefully
expose
the potential hot spots. This we did by drilling and blasting well to
the side
of these enrichments with the hope of just cracking or peeling into
them. Using
this newly established technique, we found pocket MMP2-05 on March 22
just 1
week after starting to de-water the pit.
MMP2-05, although small, was a true gem elbaite pocket.
Several fine blue gem crystals very similar to the material from
MMP23-04 were
recovered. These were embedded in golden cookeite sands. We teased
these
crystals out of the cookeite using fine picks. We even tried our high
pressure
water gun to assist us in this delicate task. Near pocket two, there
was a
similar area of enrichment. As we were to discover later, we apparently
sent
gem blue elbaite out to the dump.
Blue elbaite in cookeite, MMP2-05
|
Best elbaite crystal from MMP2-05
|
By the beginning of April
Jim Clanin had joined Richard and
I at Mt. Mica. Besides
his gem mining background,
Jim is expert
in underground roof management. Neither Richard nor I wished to acquire
this
knowledge via the school of hard knocks. Fortunately, Jim was impressed
by the competency of
the schist capping rock which  comprises
the hanging wall. It was his opinion
that we could significantly widen the drift without incurring the risk
of a
roof fall. We did find it was best to remove the
pegmatite right to the schist
as the pegmatite easily separated from the overhead schist. If there
was a
risk, it was that the pegmatite might delaminate from the schist if an
unsupported thin segment remained in the roof. We needed only to pay
attention
that we did not drill and blast the schist itself as this might loosen
a plate
that could later fall. Although Richard and I always scaled our roof to
a
degree after each blast, Jim paid much more attention to this task.
After each
blast he spent considerable time hosing the roof looking for cracks and
checking plates with the scaling bar. At times this delay was annoying;
in the long run it was
a comfort.
Jim was not at Mt. Mica
for more than a couple of days before we found pocket 3 of
2005(MMP3-05).
Richard and I had been seeing signs of its approach the prior week.
MMP3-05
started by producing a seam of opaque and poorly crystallized elbaite.
Soon
this seam led to a small pocket that produced a single nice tourmaline.
Eventually more mining revealed the pocket. The pocket was located on
the left
or up dip side of our drift and went for more than a 1.5 meters into
the side
wall. ( Jim Clanin holds up an elbaite from MMP3-05)
First material from MMP3-05
As noted before we were
taking the pegmatite right to the
schist ceiling. If we drilled the upper holes about .3 meters below the
schist,
the pegmatite peeled away cleanly without disrupting the integrity of
the
schist ceiling. The master plan was to mine up strike and slowly turn
our drift
down dip so that eventually we would be further down dip than the back
of
pocket 28-04. Then we could reverse direction and mine towards the back
of
28-04. As we advanced our drift up strike beyond MMP3-05, we no longer
could
peel away the schist from the ceiling. In
order to locate the schist, we drilled directly into
the roof at about a 45 degree angle. The schist was there but it was
now 1-2m
higher than before. Another anomaly presented itself as we advanced the
drift.
We had expected the garnet line and the entire pegmatite sheet to rise
as we
mined further eastward and up strike. The opposite was happening. Both
the
ceiling was rising and the garnet line was sinking adding to the
dimensions of
the pegmatite and the amount of rock we would have to move.
Coincident with the
thickening of the pegmatite massive
lepidolite appeared near the center of our drift. We had seen quite a
bit as thin wisps and plebs as we had been driving our drift. Our drift
was now in 10 meters long.
Besides the lepidolite, we encountered numerous small spodumene
crystals
to .2
meters. Just to the left (down dip) of the lepidolite we intercepted
pocket 4.
Pocket 4 was similar in both size and material to pocket 3. Both
produced
interesting quartz crystals and specimen tourmaline but little
gem.
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