Friday, July 18, 2003

Greetings,

Today began cool, blustery and with light rain but finished in a grand way with sun and a light breeze and blue blue skies, temperatures remained moderate - in the 70 F degree range.

Kerith and I had a late start to the morning since we were to meet a group of five from Killhope Lead Mining Centre at 11:00 a.m. at the Durham Dales Center. Four cars and five people showed up and I led the caravan to the mine. A tour for about 30 minutes with my new 2,000,000 candlelight rechargeable torch and about an hour spent helping put smallish bits of fluorite and galena into the hand pulled trolley till the back of at least one vehicle was on its springs.

The rest of the day was spent by Kerith reading and walking around the quarry whilst I started the project of dropping three large roof boulders at the entrance to the pass through between the North and South West Crosscuts. This is complicated by the fact they are all in the 300-500 pound range and have odd shaped roots that keep them keyed together -- plus you don't stand under such and work away which is the easiest position. All three have pockets of fine fluorite on the side our underside of them so we really don't want to drop them, just sort of ease them down,if possible. It took me nearly five hours to remove all the rock under the three and remove a keystone piece that will leave a range of movement possible, but by that time my headlamp was down to about 2 candlelight. Byron, in the meantime had been much more productive. Managing to bring down in several pieces a nearly 4'x2' roof plate covered with glassy gem to gemmy twins to 1", some truly fine pieces -- all I had to show was one nice small cabinet and several bags of small twins.

Due to my headlamp situation we left about an hour ahead of Byron and went to The Drift in Daddry Shield to sort through material for Bill Pogue to bring back to the states since he leaves very early on Sunday morning.

Tomorrow, Saturday, we have Lindsay and Patricia Greenbank coming over for a BBQ along with Ralph Sutcliffe. All will be spending the night here and we eagerly look forward to good company, food and drink tomorrow evening.

That is about all the new except that BBC1 has the Proms from Royal Albert Hall for the next four hours, BBC2 has been showing the British Open since early this morning and the other two channels have some horrible evening soaps and sadly their is no movie theater in the entire Dale - even Durham the historic university town with thousands of students has no movie theater, we have to go to Gateshead about 1 hour away and make reservations at that! Can't ever complain again about having to go down to Bonsall for a flick.

Best Regards,

Cal & Kerith

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