Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Greetings from Weardale.

This morning is much like yesterday - cool, cloudy and still. This is, except for the local rooster and one lone sheep with something important on its mind. Yesterday it drizzled a good part of the day but never got around to a proper rain.

The saga of the shipping bins took a somewhat dramatic, if not totally unexpected turn yesterday morning. Jonina was on the phone with the vendor as soon as she could get someone there to answer the phone. What she learned was that the items we were promised delivery on a week ago are, in fact, not even in stock and will not be so until after we are scheduled to leave. After much consternation she decided to order a supply of some similar but slightly smaller bins, which we were told should be here today. This has also caused us to push our shipping-out day for the fluorite back to Friday. A little last minute drama always seems to make a race interesting to the spectators, but perhaps not so much to the participants.

About 1000 Sarah and Dave's kids Joseph and Shanade showed up and Jonina put them to work cleaning and sorting the remaining material. Cal and I loaded up his car with low-grade specimens and drove them up to Killhope where they give them away to visiting school children (and not a few adults as well, I am told). This accomplished, Cal headed off to Stanhope on some errands and I headed to the mine.

Once there I found Dave busy mucking out the main face with the Eimco, and is the star of today's photo. Byron was busy poking at the same spot he was at the day before, and Rob was hard at cleaning out the latest pile of rubble we've created in the northern tunnel of the West Cross Cut. There is no rail in this tunnel so the job has to be done entirely by hand. I started this process yesterday when Rob was off, and given the size of some of those rocks, I am quite sure that Rob is earning his pay. I spent a bit more time mucking out the latest rock fall in the center of the West Cross Cut and attempted to repeat Cal's collecting success of the previous day with only meager results. Around mid-afternoon the ceiling began dropping a few mud balls so I decided to vacate the premises and joined Byron to inspect the face of the now mucked out main tunnel. The face is still highly mineralized and becoming fairly vuggy, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, the rock is still rather hard and poorly fractured, making it difficult to extract the vugs. The fluorite here is similar to what we've seen the past week - large green crystals with purple cores and often a white calcite overgrowth. Not transparent except at the edges, but still fairly attractive and different from what we get in the flats. We managed to extract one large cluster, numerous smaller bits, and some of the best cube-octahedral galena clusters I've yet seen from the mine. Don't get too excited about this, however - they're absolutely no match for Dal'negorsk of Virbunum Trend.

Back at the cottage Kerith had prepared a dinner of pork chops, macaroni & cheese, and the requisite English peas (no chips, however). Simple stuff, but very good after a day of moving rock. Today we will continue to get everything organized for shipping out. Hopefully the bins will arrive as promised.

Stay tuned for a couple more…

Cheers,

Jesse and the Crew

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