Tuesday August 26, 2003

Greetings from Weardale.

Today begins like yesterday, cool and cloudy. It never really cleared up yesterday, and even got around to raining for a little bit. Being that I was in the mine for a good part of the day, I didn't notice it too much. Joan always claims that the good weather seems to come with her whenever she visits. It certainly followed her back to California where I hear it is rather hot right now.

Yesterday morning was spent shifting everyone's gear around here at the cottage to make room for Cal and Kerith. Once they got settled in, Cal and I headed for the mine. Cal and I set to cleaning out the fallen rock and mud from the West Cross Cut. What we were confronted with was a huge mass of thick mud with rocks of various sized embedded in it. In order to shift this mélange out of the mine one first has to probe the mass with a bar in order to locate the rocks. Once found, they then have to be extracted from the mud, which given its tenacious nature is no simple task. The remaining clay is then sliced up into manageable sized lumps with a shovel. All is then hauled out be hand and dumped over the side of the landing with as much fervor as one can manage. Today's photo is of Cal beginning the task.

Once we had cleared our a reasonable amount of the debris Cal set to what I know he would really prefer to do - collect specimens. As anyone familiar with our on-going story knows, collecting at the Rogerley involves the use of much water. This is usually okay for the one manning the water hose, but anyone else in close proximity will quickly acquire what I call our "mine tan" from the spray of muddy water. As it was a rather chilly day anyway, I didn't fancy getting soaked so kept me self warm by continuing to haul rock and mud out of the West Cross Cut. Some people dream of spending their spare time lying on a tropical beach, I come to northern England to haul rock out of a mine. To each his own, I guess. For his efforts Cal turned up two really nice specimens, a bag of single crystals and a bunch of junky "bottom rock".

Byron spent the day poking around. When collecting in known areas of the mine begins to get lean as it now is in both the Dipper and West Cross Cut Byron goes into exploration mode, washing and poking at the tunnel wall anywhere some mineralization is showing. He's always been quite effective at finding new pockets this way, and I sometimes think he can actually smell the specimens. He managed to find one pocket near the main face that yielded a good number of specimens, but all had fairly small crystals.

Dave spent the morning putting a new timber set into the tunnel at the main face. By mid afternoon he had that in order and set to drilling the face of another round. This was loaded and shot at the end of the day, so today will be a day of mucking out the main tunnel and poking around there to see if we've exposed anything of interest.

Everyone seems to be up and moving this morning, so I guess I had better get this report off and claim my place in the bathroom queue.

Stay tuned for more…

Cheers,

Jesse & the crew.

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