As mentioned in the previous page, we were beginning to get the notion that we were dealing now with a
pocket zone or system. Every few feet there was another vug with at
least some green elbaite. All of these vugs were armored with
tenacious lepidolite that was nearly impossible to chisel away. Most of
these pockets contained a few chunks of badly etched near colorless
cesian beryl. A redeeming factor though was that many of these remnants
were quite gemmy. ( In the image, the Dagenais pocket can be seen to
the left. Pocket 9 has been completely removed; pocket 7 can be seen
mucked in at the right. Several vugs are exposed in the middle within
the rusty band. The very rusty joint is just below the spot were our
blowpipe had ejected  tourmalines. The swelling of the garnet 'line' can
be seen all along this area as the speckled area just above the
water.)
We had couple more feet of the pegmatite to work before we once again were required to do the 'heavy lifting' of
overburden removal. These couple of feet though would expose what our
blow piping had been hinting at. So after placing holes on either side
of the hole we blow piped and loading them lightly, we blasted the
ledge. Pocket 10 was exposed. This pocket was somewhat different then
the others we had encountered down dip to this point from the Dagenais.
There was little of the lepidolite hard coat but a lot of well
crystallized microcline. In the image at the top of the page a
microcline crystal is visible behind the hat. After setting up our
water pump connected to our garden hose, our primary pocket digging
tool, we immediately began to expose very large elbaite crystals in a
bed of golden cookeite and cleavelandite. At the left Mary and Richard
pose in front of the pocket. Pocket MMP7-04 is visible to the
right. Between them are two large elbaites laying in cookeite.
This pocket was just at the base of the smooth rusty surface in the
photo above. Although this pocket had several large
tourmalines, it had few if any small ones. The largest tourmaline
was more than 38 cm long. It was a color zoned tourmaline, green
at the termination passing through colorless, red and finally into blue
black. The smaller elbaite was also color zoned and had some fine gemmy
sections.
Large but shattered elbaites in pocket MMP10-04
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Gemmy elbaite sections from pocket MMP10-04
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A color zoned elbaite fragment from MMP10-04
Note the cookeite coating
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Another view of the tourmaline at the top of
the page
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