18 KM
Yesterday, cloudy but not too cold, time to get into gear and head out towards new digs. According to my map, approximately 10 KM into the new ground, pack up my rucksack with hammers and chisels and set out.
It's an easy walk around the lake, on the railway tracks, not ideal (trespassing, fines), but I know the train schedule and the few times I've seen maintenance they've always been loud enough to give me plenty of time and warning to hide in the trees.
A long walk, after a long and sedentary winter.
There are pegmatites all the way in, everywhere there is potential, and while the bedrock is most clearly visible along the cuts there's another 90% of the ground that can be dug up, there are abundant changes in terrane, numerous faults, and every 50 or 100 yards there's signs of another pegmatite.
A little bit of banging, quartz, smoky quartz, some black tourmaline in the beginning, small muscovite flakes, lots of feldspar, as you get further in the muscovite turns to biotite mica, some pegmatites - narrow, an inch, max, others several feet wide. Chip, chip with the hammer. I need to bring a can of paint to mark the areas with more promise.
9 KM in, roughly, and it's more or less time to turn back. This is definitely worth considerably more prospecting, exploring, most pegmatites where I've found anything it's only been after repeated efforts and digging, there are so many here that even to canvas the ones I've seen exposed would take several months, let alone the ones that must lie buried under overburden and moss, and the countless others that must line the tracks for the next 100 KM or so...
Now the walk out, and at about 15 KM I notice my feet dragging, the pack, it's growing heavier and heavier, how much does it weigh? No more than 30 lbs, but it's starting to feel like a ton, and when finally I'm free I'm realizing it's time for a booty camp for prospectors. Nevermind, the restaurant will be open soon enough, I'll get my training in there, I'll also need though a mountain bike (the investment of time hiking could better be spent digging) - or - better yet - a dirt bike.
Hmmmm.
Or a Jet Ski...
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- Category: Miscellany
Jam Tart
And, today another trip planned with Chris, a 10 KM hike to some new ground I'd mapped, only Chris, he isn't big into the hiking in, looking for shit, I've spoiled him with the good findings, and at the last minute he bails. Jam-Tart. Anyways, tomorrow I'll hit it on my own, and won't he be envious of my finds....
In any event it's a good thing, "New Ground" is only a phrase for the places I haven't visited in person but nonetheless spent a great deal of time finding via maps and old geological surveys. So - rather than have him profit off my expertise, it's better for me to find it first and decide if I'm willing to share...
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- Category: People
Spring 2021
The last couple of days a record 10 degrees above zero. The snow is gone, time to get out there.
A sunny morning, a spiderling drops from the eavestrough, blue-bottle fly on the glass of the deck. Chris and I head out to a few spots.
Nothing new, places we've been before, some still too deep in snow. But, digging up by a mine where we'd found some good quartz and silver ore he finds some amber. Not amber, precisely, but glassy resin in the dirt. Looking around I spot the bark it's dripped from, tear it down, when:
It begins an awful hissing and takes me a moment to figure out what it is. I would have thought - given the abundance of mines, that hibernation would take place a little deeper in the mountain, but maybe (hopefully!!!) this guy was an early riser.
Anyways, tuck him back near a hollow on the tree - hopefully he can resume his hibernation, not enough bugs out yet. And a reminder to be a little more careful traipsing about the woods, wouldn't want to prematurely wake up anything else.
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Stormy March 2021
So I haven't seen the guy in about 7 weeks or so, finally on a rare trip to town stopped by. He's the same.
His house, the same, packed chock-a-block with rubbish, if you look close that's him lying on his bed under the suede/sheepskin coat.
A space heater set up in his bathroom, no fire-hazard here...
He explains the mess by telling me all these extraneous possessions absorb the heat, keep it warm for longer...
And, returning home afterwards, a ton of bags of stuff/scrolls to go through.
Christmas gifts for the kids, for me, for anyone I might know. And, at first guess, 200 (??) Scrolls, but after spending 2 hours looking at them and rerolling them I'll revise that number up to about 500. I still have a lot to go through. Scrolls for the daughter, son, new models (Ms. Mountain Climber Gal, Ghost Gals), treasure maps ("Chinky Cave" up behind Riondel. No, he's not particularly politically correct), other absurdities. Par for the course, maybe 10% of the scrolls are "Good", the rest, well...
I'm not going to be one of those vandals that destroys everything that I don't like, but there was a lot in this load to rebel against, and there's something psychically draining about reading any quantity of these at once. One is a joy, 500 is a plague.
Anyways, that's it, he's alive and well, I started making an unboxing video but got so discouraged that I ended up aborting, the same over and over again.
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- Category: Stormy
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