Page 13 - SparHawk Maine Tourmaline

RHP
River of Gems Pocket
tipped screwdrivers. Jeff’s mine
has produced some of these hard
rock mineral specimens. Most of
his crystals are loose, perfectly clean and with just a light rubbing off of the white clay they are display case ready. Here’s more of what I saw at Jeff’s mine, on this July afternoon a void of sort within solid rock. As Jeff removed the overburden and melted his way through the white clay he revealed huge smokey quartz crystals at the top creating a streambed lined with lavender lepidolite. The streambed was packed with an oats and chopped nuts granola-like mixture of pocket gravel composed of bits of lepidolite, cleavelandite, cookite, and quartz, and embedded with hun- dreds, thousands of string bean-like green crystals of tourmaline. The mixture even felt like granola. This granola-like mix was smothered within and beneath a slippery white clay reported to be decomposed feldspar called kaolin. The white clay seeps down into the granola-like pocket material, kind of like putting a thickened heavy cream or yogurt on your breakfast cereal. The gems seemed to be resting at the juncture point of white clay with many tourmaline crystals imbedded deeper in the granola pocket materials. I’m told every pocket is different at the Havey. My experience has now been enlightened by these three serious gem pockets at Jeff’s mine. And each has been very different.
This white clay, or kaolin, for me is one of the mysteries of tourmaline gem mining – it seems to be the gem world’s bubble wrap, an amazingly
Tourmaline, like pick-up sticks
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