Friday, August 22, 2003

Greetings from Weardale.

Yesterday the weather got back to normal around here. It was cloudy all day and for a time during the late afternoon we even had that famous Weardale "horizontal rain". Our visitors from Paris who arrived yesterday afternoon were quite happy with it, however. This comes as no surprise considering how awfully hot it has been on the Continent this summer. This morning we are back to cool, clear and a bit windy.

Yesterday morning Cal had to take Kerith back to the medical clinic in Bishop Auckland so I went to the mine first thing to meet with the mine safety inspector. We spent about an hour looking over the mine, which he found quite fascinating as he had never seen a mine operated solely for the mineral specimens. Afterwards we spent about another hour discussing what he thought we needed to do, which mostly came down to better documentation of procedures. He was actually quite helpful in explaining British mining regulations and seemed genuinely interested in helping us.

Byron meanwhile, was poking about the main tunnel face that we shot the day before and had found a series of cavities extending across the face from the north side to the center. These were mostly massive fluorite but occasionally would contain large untwined fluorite crystals of an attractive blue-green color - quite different than the color we get from the flats. These were exceedingly difficult to extract as anything other than single crystals or fragments, but Byron managed to get a few. One is pictured in today's photo. Hopefully there will be more.

About 1600 our French visitors Etienne and Suzanne showed up at the mine and had a quick look around. Etienne Guillou is a fluorite collector and had authored a book and extensive website on fluorite occurrences in France, and both seemed fascinated by what they saw in the mine. Afterwards we headed up the dale, first to get them a room at the Stanhope Old Hall, then to the Mine House to look at more fluorite and have a glass of wine. They had driven about 1000 km from Paris and Etienne seemed in need of a little painkiller.

We all had a very nice dinner with our landlords Bob and Mary. This was suppose to be a "going away" dinner, but the verdict on Kerith's ankle is that it is truly broken and she will not be traveling anywhere for a few weeks. Right now she has a lower leg cast on, which will hopefully be changed to a removable plastic one in a few days.

Today everyone will be at the mine in the morning and I hope we have enough lights to go around. Dave had the day off yesterday as his long overdue custom-built motorbike frame was finally ready for pickup. Given his degree of anticipation, I didn't think it proper to expect someone to work on what certainly amounted to his Christmas day. Today he will be back and planning on mucking out the main face. Hopefully more of our blue-green fluorite will emerge.

Stay tuned for more…

Cheers,

Jesse & the crew.

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