Thursday, August 14, 2003

Good morning from Weardale. This morning the weather is sunny, clear and slightly cool - a perfect day here. This is quite a relief as Joan and I arrived in London on Sunday, which was the hottest day on record in the UK. I'm sure that anyone who has lived through a summer in some place like New Orleans will call me a sissy (or worse), but 38C (100F), 80% humidity and no air conditioning isn't much fun. So welcome back to the cool north!

Joan and I spent a couple days getting up here, visiting a few friends along the way. Monday we paid a visit to British mineral dealer Mark Wrigley, who lives in Reading, a short train ride outside of London. He had made an appointment with a long-time local fluorite collector for us to see his collection, and it was well worth it. Looking at shelves crammed full of fluorite from almost every known UK locality (and some foreign as well) provokes the proverbial "kid in a candyshop" response, but the added heat from all the display lighting took its toll and soon Joan was standing outside the room watching us and wondering how long before someone passed out from heat stroke. Fortunately, everyone survived the ordeal in fine form. Went back to Mark's place for the afternoon to look at more minerals and catch up on all the latest juicy gossip on the local mineral scene. Mark had just acquired a collection and had drafted his two teenage boys to do the data entry before uploading it to his website, so I got to do the fun part and help unwrap the specimens.

Headed north on Tuesday, stopping in Doncaster, near Leeds to see a journalist friend who had recently moved north from the London area. She took a job with a firm in York, which is a very nice, but expensive place to live, so she and her musician husband had bought a "fixer-upper" in Doncaster, a bit to the south. Aside from affordable housing, the only thing to recommend Doncaster seemed to be it's large horseracing track. The local road maintenance authority did seem to have an appallingly good ability to turn the town center into total chaos with a broad assortment of orange traffic cones, however. We did manage to find a good pub with an outdoor beer garden, and spent the afternoon getting caught up on recent events in everyone's lives.

Finished the drive to Weardale yesterday morning and arrived at the Mine House by mid-morning. Jonina was busy painting an assortment of wooden boards, which I am told will soon be assembled into a storage shed for our junk. After getting settled in, I left Joan to check her e-mails and work-related correspondence, and headed to the mine. I always find it amazing to come back toward the end of the mining season and see how much has been accomplished in the time I've been away. We now have about 10 meters of new tunnel along the main vein at the head of the main tunnel. There were some cavities lined with green and purple fluorite exposed, but it seems that no good specimens have emerged from this area yet. The east tunnel is now finally connected to the main one through the area where we found the Solstice pocket in 2001. The area around the Dipper pocket has been developed and continues to produce for us. Most impressively, though, the north and south drifts of the West Cross Cut has been joined in a large loop, and timbered to keep everything in place. The northern drift has also been extended westward and appears to have passed out of the flats into barren limestone. Mineralization is still showing on the north side of this drift, and still appears to be going strong at the face of the southern one. After getting a tour and update on the summer's events from Dave, the crew went for their bait (local term for a lunch break) and I got to some digging in the southern West Cross Cut. This process mostly consists of digging out gobs of thick mud from around rocks, and then trying to pry the rocks out without leaving any adhering fluorite crystals behind in the remaining mud. I did manage to get several nice pieces, including one monster that must weigh around 30-40 kg. This one was suspended in the mud a few feet above the pocket floor, with the exposed crystals facing downward. When faced with such a situation, one always lives in fear of having the rock fall out of the mud and land crystal-face downward in the muck on the pocket floor. This rock was far too massive to just pull out of the pocket, but somehow I was able to get it to flip over as the mud gave way and got a very nice, but truly massive specimen for my efforts. Today's photo is of the result.

I think today will be a mine day for both Joan and I, and hopefully we will catch up with Cal and Kerith in the process. I think Jonina plans to continue with her budding carrier as a shed constructor, but at present is still lounging in her pajamas, drinking coffee and playing cards with Byron.

Stay tuned for more…

Cheers,

Jesse & the crew.

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