After months of planning and coordinating with Tina and Bill Frazer with the BE Clement Mineral Museum, I drove down to Marion, Kentucky on Friday morning, March 30th, to meet up with Mike Streeter and Bruce Skubon, to prepare for another dig at the Eureka Fluorite Mine.  I decided to leave Missy with my parents for this trip, due to the forecast for possible rain and hot temps on Sunday, April 1st. I also decided to take a chance and drive down through Illinois hoping that ILDOT had all the road construction finished from the past two years, but as I discovered, they move slower than MODOT apparently when it comes to road reconstruction…what a mess, especially the five mile stretch right around Mount Vernon…and its bad enough you cant drive faster than a posted speed limit of 65 mph, but then when you hit those construction zones, they slow you down even more to 45 mph, for several miles a stretch with absolutely no activity on those long stretches, no less….aggravating to say the least.

Luckily I made good time though and had great weather, I didnt even have to turn the ac on til I reached I-24. I was taking a load of rocks down to the museum, a couple of buckets of grab bag material for them, and some druse quartz, bladed barite, and poker chip combos as well as some Arkansas quartz. I also had some extras for Tina, for her rock gardens at home. I had researched for the lower gas prices on gasbuddy.com and found Paducah to have the least expensive gas in the immediate area, so I stopped on the north side of town and filled up at the Pilot Truck Center before driving on down to Marion. All the way down through Illinois it was right at four dollars a gallon, but twenty cents a gallon cheaper in Kentucky and thirty cents a gallon cheaper where I live, so luckily I didnt have to stop in Illinois to gas up, and as it turned out, I was getting about 23 miles to the gallon as well, so I was quite happy with that.

As I drove north of Eddyville, I came upon the red barn on the left side, and noticed a beautiful white horse feeding between the pond and barn, and stopped to photograph the scene….

 

..its always a pretty scene on the west side of the road on Hwy 641 just north of Hwy 62, and this year with the dogwoods in full bloom, it was even prettier and I couldnt resist….

I arrived at the museum about thirty minutes ahead of Mike, who stopped at the hotel to check on his room. I visited with Tina and unloaded the buckets and goodies I had brought to her, she was quite delighted with everything and I let her decide what to take home and what to keep for herself. Mike arrived soon after and visited with Tina and brought her some goodies too. He received a call from Bruce Skubon shortly after, who indicated he was close by and would soon arrive and register for the weekend dig, then drive out to the mine and join us for the rest of the afternoon.

Mike and I drove on out to the mine with a key to the gate left at the museum with Tina, as we wanted to see what it looked like after the mild winter had taken its toll, and arrived to find it actually looking pretty good….

Bill had placed the pump and gas tank on the bank above the pit prior to our arrival. The trackhoe was on the north side of the main tailing pile, that we had created last year at our spring dig, and it looked like only minimal drainage had occurred from that pile down toward the pit. In October of 2011, Bill had Wayne come in with the trackhoe and dig out mud and rock on the north side of the pit, pulling it out about fifteen feet from where we had dug it out, anticipating a visit from some European rockhounds at the November dig, and then wound up with only a few diggers who didnt even touch that area.

While waiting for Bruce to arrive, Mike and I started the pump after checking the oil and gas levels, and began the task of draining the pond of accumulated water in the pit. There seemed to be a lot more algae in the water this year than we had noticed in years past….…while waiting for the water level to lower, I walked around the pit and checked for fluorite that naturally erodes out of the banks and tailing piles throughout the winter, and found some nice small clusters…..

…and plates…..

 

 

…and another small cluster sitting on top of the dirt….

…pretty soon the pit was pumped down about halfway and we were able to see some exposed areas to dig out the next day…we also discovered a huge chunk of rock that had apparently been dug out last fall for the November dig, and left up on top at the base of the tailing pile. We looked it over and found some areas of galena lead cubes on the backside of it, so Mike decided to see if he could cob it down and reveal some pockets on it….

After the pit drained down, we decided on our course of action for the next morning and headed out. On the way back to the motel, I stopped at a few places to photograph the sunbeams and setting sun. This was the first location, a church near Eddyville that had a pretty field full of yellow flowers….

…but it just seemed to lack something…so I drove back north on Hwy 641 a short distance to where I had noticed an abandoned farm just off the road…there was a neat old two story house built with yellow native stone and just past the house was a big beautiful barn and silo….

…I decided to stick around and shoot the sunbeams for a bit, since the sun was still up high in the sky…I pulled out a sunset filter to see what effect it would have on the clouds….

…it turned everything, including the road, to an orange color…which I didnt like too much…..in the next few minutes, the color of the clouds turned to a blue color and I liked that color alot better….

…the blue color enhanced the sunbeams and showed them better….

…but as the sun moved across those blue clouds, a little yellow color would creep in around the edges….

…and then the silver roof on the barn went blue…..

…and the last one I took before my stomach started talking to me…

We arrived the next morning and found the pit full of water once again, so just ahead of Wayne arriving to fire up his trackhoe, we started pumping water while he dug out a ramp to enable him to track down to the edge of the pit and remove volumes of mud……while waiting for the water level to recede, I did some more surface searching and found yet another nice small plate….

Bruce decided to lend a hand to Wayne and removed some of that icky soupy thick mud by hand shoveling some out in places Wayne would be able to reach with the bucket….

…and soon enough, Wayne was in position and started removing a big soupy mix of mud from the center of the pit so we could use it as a base sump for the pump…...he was placing the mud up on top of the pile and it was running down like Mount St Helens and looked like a lava flow….…Mike was washing off the bench with a garden hose while Wayne dug out the mud…

…and boy was he removing some mud….…he was also removing lots of water with each scoop and eventually the water level started dropping too…exposing some nice fluorite pockets to us….

and he also removed a few original mine timbers, which indicated we were near an old horizontal shaft, they were encased and perfectly preserved in the mud layers….Mike and Bruce took a few up to the road for anyone that wanted some later…

…Wayne was soon surrounded by the soupy mud, mainly due to the places he was placing it and it running back down toward the pit like lava….…a fact which would later lead to trouble for him, but for now he was doing a good job of removing the mud and revealing what turned out to be an old horizontal shaft from operations back in the 1920`s when the mine first operated….…eventually he started pulling out some huge boulders laced with fluorite cubes as well….

…which Mike cobbed down into smaller, more manageable chunks that could be carried out by one or two guys….

…soon thereafter tho, Wayne became stuck in the mud and we started draining the pit with the pump while he tried in vain to dig himself out……we were soon all at work in the pit finding what could be found….

…and we repeated the process on Sunday as well….

…and here is one of the finds from Saturday, that made the weekend worthwhile….

 

One of the nice things about working down at the Eureka Mine, is that Bill Frazer comes to check on you on a regular basis and takes really good care of you….here he is on one of his regular checkup trips to the mine….

Thanks Bill for being such a great Host !!!