Coromoto Minerals
The 2004 Season at Mt. Mica
---- June Page 3 -----
As I wrote on the previous page, we would have to remove some more schist in order for us to continue to work this area. It looked to us there may be more associated with pocket MMP10-04. We had to be careful though. The pegmatite has a tendency to spawl off when removing the schist that sits on top. Worse yet, if there are pockets present in spawls off even more readily and right to the pocket zone. The pockets are frequently surrounded by cleavelandite that breaks easily during blasting. Our procedure is to drill down until we start to see feldspar in our drill cuttings. This indicates we are in the pegmatite. Unfortunately, this requires under drilling ( drilling below) the schist for several inches at least and into the pegmatite. The bottom of our blast then is in the top of the pegmatite. Thinking there may be more to find, we decided to fill the bottom of the holes we drilled with stemming gravel to get the detonation to occur above the pegmatite. That was plan. The execution was flawed. We forgot to put the stemming in the bottom of the holes. After the dust and fumes cleared out of the pit, we went down to check that all of the holes had gone off successfully. They had, but our omission was now painfully obvious. There was a large junk of pegmatite sitting amongst the tons of schist muck. Worse yet, the top of thepeg boulder was covered with pocket lining. Somewhere under the tons of schist there may be something we wanted to keep. We decided that we would dig and truck off most of the schist but leave the portion surrounding the broken pegmatite for last. Two hours later we had dug and trucked out many loads and we were now down to the part that may have something buried beneath. I was standing behind the excavator watching as Richard twitched some large schist boulders out of the way. To my amazement he then took the bucket of the excavator and gently pawed through the cookeite we had just exposed. Richard is good with the JD110, he can almost scratch his back with it, but this was going too far. Annoyed, I asked him to stop. We had agreed that once we got to the pegmatite we would switch to manual mode....hoes and shovels. I went down to investigate what he had exposed while Richard waited in the JD to see if any more mechanized digging was required. |