[Rockhounds] Collecting trip 2008 - Montana

[Lanny R]

Hi Everyone,

Kicking a few rocks on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska:

Nathan and others promoted a good idea. While many of us are stuck in  
the doldrums of winter, perhaps we can inspire some rockhounding  
enthusiasm by reporting on collecting trips of 2008. I appreciated  
Nathan's report on the Snowbird Mine, MT, especially as he mentioned,  
he dragged me up there with him. I like that unusual deposit with its  
giant crude quartz crystals and pegmatitic texture quartz, calcite and  
fluorite. Collecting parisite, quartz and fluorite is getting to be  
kind of tough, but it still is a good locality to visit. It's only a 3  
1/2 hour drive and hike from my house, so I do get up there every  
couple of years.

It has been quite a while since I last wrote a trip report for the  
Rockhounds list, been too busy with too many projects to write  
articles much anymore. Time to get back into it, so here is a short  
one for the armchair collecting interest.

I've been trying to get my collecting years started by getting out in  
the spring into the mines of Idaho or Montana. Often in April, if the  
winter was not too severe and spring warm so that the snow was  
melting, exposing some rocks. Spring of 2008 was not a good one for  
that. Winter was long (3 times average snowfall in much of Idaho) and  
spring was slow and cold. I didn't make it out until I went up to  
Prince of Wales Island, Alaska to complete a sculpture project for  
Gary McWilliams of Stone Arts of Alaska at Craig. I love that place  
and could stay there.

While on the island, I did some more prospecting (this was the third  
year in a row). This year, my trip was only for two weeks, and that  
was the last two weeks of May, so the mountains were still covered  
with snow which left the many roadcuts and quarries and lower mines as  
the only places to explore. I was too busy to get out often, but did  
get out a few times.

One of the most interesting trips was to the It Mine on the Kasaan  
Peninsula on the eastern side of the island. Much of the northern part  
of the peninsula is lands owned by one of the Native Alaskan  
corporations and most of it is closed. That's too bad, because there  
are several copper mines in skarns with potential for malachite and  
other copper minerals as well as epidote, orange calcite, grossular- 
andradite and other minerals. Skarns are one of my favorite rock types  
to explore.

The It Mine is northwest of the small village of Kasaan, and the roads  
are open; I expect that when logging in that area is finished the  
roads will be closed there, but maybe not, there are areas of National  
Forest mixed with the Native Corporation lands, so maybe the area will  
stay open.

The day I visited the mine was relatively warm -- 70s F and partly  
sunny. Access is via a hike down a steep hill through a clear cut with  
a lot of slash on the ground then across a flat swampy area, so it was  
a hot sweaty battle to get to the mine. It was necessary to climb up  
over old rotten logs and stumble through the limbs, tree tops and junk  
wood, meanwhile, avoiding the wet spots and mud holes. With the time I  
had, I was only able to visit the main mine area which has several  
long dumps on a flat next to a shaft and an adit (the workings hidden  
in the brush and logging debris). There are more workings nearby, but  
I did not even see the dumps in the rugged terrain of the adjoining  
hillsides.

The dumps were coarse, composed of large pieces of massive epidote,  
diopside, calcite and garnet. Much of this was vuggy, but these  
crystal-lined cavities were typically filled with white calcite.  
Grossular-andradite crystals were mostly small; the largest I saw was  
about 1/4 inch, except, I did see one crystal about an inch across  
that was a broken crystal frozen in the calcite. Epidote was also  
mostly small crystals, with diverging groups up to more than an inch  
long being scarce, and I did not find any that would make decent  
specimens.

There were grossular-andradite clusters coated with tiny dark green  
chlorite. In some cavities these are covered with "stalactitic"  
growths of quartz in parallel growth probably reflecting growth  
controlled by the calcite that filled the cavity. Rutile(?) occurred  
as tiny black needles on crude quartz crystals. Pyrite was abundant as  
micro to small cubes and pyritohedrons on quartz and other minerals  
and sometimes as large crystals to more than an inch. I did manage to  
get one nice cluster, frozen in calcite that etched out to be a small  
miniature of complex cube-octahedron combinations. Titanite was  
uncommon as tiny to small thin, white crystals with diopside and the  
garnet. Diopside was present as masses and spongy masses of subhedral  
to euhedral crystals, tiny to small.

Chalcopyrite forms masses adjoining cavities so that broad crystal  
faces (up to at least 2 inches across) form the sides of some  
cavities. These are always coated with tiny crystals of chlorite,  
pyrite and magnetite. There also was uralite as tiny crystals of  
actinolite replacing small crystals of diopside(?); acctinolite in the  
byssolite habit, and tiny crystals of pyrite and magnetite on the  
chalcopyrite were present.

I did not see any secondary minerals, I'd hoped for some malachite.  
Gary did give me one small piece off a sample he had found several  
years ago. This had divergent groups of malachite needles with small  
calcite crystals and tiny dendritic copper groups included in some of  
the calcite crystals.

A small quarry alongside the access road was also in a skarn showing  
vuggy massive diopside and epidote. There were no open cavities, only  
crystal lined cavities filled with white or orange calcite. I took  
three fist-size pieces that looked like they may have euhedral  
diopside crystals and, back home was surprised to find tiny clusters  
of molybdenite in one, but only poor quality diopside and garnet.

I was not able to transport much weight home, but considering that I  
did have several days remaining before I left, I could do some acid  
etching. Thus, I carried out a day-pack load of selected pieces and  
etched out the calcite back at the studio. Mostly I etched out only  
enough calcite to determine if there were good crystals in the  
cavities so that the crystals remained protected. These pieces I took  
home and completed the calcite removal here, recovering several fairly  
nice specimens from micro to miniature. Looking at the specimens  
obtained on this expedition to the It Mine makes me want to go back.  
Spending lots of money on HCl to etch out calcite seems to be a bad  
habit of mine.

I had a little more successful collecting on the island last summer,  
but that's another story.

Regards,

Lanny