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Arrowhead
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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A short walk on the beach, looking for arrowheads or flakes. Nothing. Then, just leaving the beach and the daughter's calling and I spot this:
An inch long, napped on both edges, point broken off but you can see the percussion marks (divots in the chert - where it was pressed to flake and shape)
I have every suspicion this is going to be a great prospecting year.
New Crystal Digs
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
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Thursday, up early and off to Creston. A spot of thrifting planned.
Off the ferry and behind an Alberta plate. Yeah, they drive the BC economy, now if only they could learn to fucking drive their cars...
You forget, over the winter, what it's like in the summer to forever be behind some half-witted Kootenay-struck Albertan.
I'm in a bit of a hurry and alcoholic rage and haven't the patience to drive 100KM at 30K/HR - the winding road around the lake is a double line the whole way, and Herb and Marge are driving slow to gawk at every fucking seagull and lake view they spot along the way. Albertans, they deserve their own special rant which I'll come back to after this....
I overtake. It's dodgy - big ticket - but there's no cops out here and if there were they should really be checking Herb & Marge's fitness to be on the road, not mine to pass.
Get to Creston. Check the thrift shops.
Check 'em all out, lots of new stuff, I pick up an old beat-up tile saw for $10.00 - useful, if you have a lot of rocks that need cutting/polishing. A gold Cross pen for $1.00 - I despise them, but I know they generally sell for a lot more than that. And a masterful example of grandma's quilting:
A mere $1.00. Now I have no clue as to what I will do with it - regift it? I have friends that Crochet - god-damned, how old am I? Fucking hell. Or - get one of those friends to repurpose above throw into a onesie for the upcoming rave season...
Let me think about this...
Up the pass to check on a spot I'd been hoping to get back to for aquamarine and black tourmaline. Nope. Still snow, fresh bear tracks. Bears are fine, but the snow, these tires, nope. I'm a slow learner, but eventually even the dumbest dogs learn.
Back through Creston and up lake. Too early for the ferry so I pull off on a logging road, the east side of the lake is dry some 3, 4, 5 KM up. A new road, and a ways in and I spot some features, get out to explore.
Sure enough, large blocky quartz boulders, and I'm digging through them, in the forest floor, finding smoky quartz crystals. Not many, very few, they seem to be shedding from a quartz ledge above. I fill my pockets and return to the Jeep. Empty pockets, time now to leave, only the jeep isn't starting.
Damned. After I'd been so cautious and all.
The jeep, perched on a bluff overlooking the lake, it's got cell signal, and Chris is texting me. He's like a jealous wife, "What are you up to", I'm evasive, "Car broke down East Shore", He's helpful about coming to pick me up, I'm pretty sure that sooner or later the jeep will start, it just needs time, but I grudgingly give him my location...
I feel guilty about this, off prospecting alone, what I fucking love most to do - but now he's coming down, on the 2:50 Ferry to join me.
I continue digging, and go back up to the ledge - I'm getting some blockier quartz, traces of silver,(Galena), and going around a corner of the mountain find a shallow adit.
Now it all makes sense.
And digging out the adit floor, better and better crystals, bigger crystals, there's vugs here for sure, and - while I've yet to find anything great there's a definite trend towards finding stuff that's better and better...
Quartz boulder with slight crystals.
Blockier and blockier crystals...
Crystal points in a pocket
Good signs
Things get better and better, but the sun gets lower, the light's disappearing and we're done. We go up the road to check things out - beautiful granite bluffs, high cliffs, it's own beauty, very promising, make a note to self this area has potential.
Then - to the jeep - it starts - and we're off on the race to the ferry.
The Gloaming, that time of the day when you see it all, deer, elk, caribou, one of those dumb pheasant-type birds that does a beak-foot-beak-foot slow walk across the highway and doesn't speed up for even a second when it sees you barreling down on it at 120K an hour...It's not in my bumper, so I'm guessing it survived - but how?
This is one race we don't win. Pulling into the landing you can see the ferry pulling away - we missed it - by 7 minutes. Damn, damn, damn. Should have left that reconnaissance until another day.
Back to Crawford Bay, Newkeys, the pub, is still serving on the patio, they've a gas BBQ, we settle in for a beer and fish and chips. A few of the local alcoholics are dropping by, bitching about the COVID mandates, I'm just fucking glad we've got somewhere - anywhere - to wait for the ferry. The landing is a destitute place.
It's a beautiful night.
And who's here but the redhead I gave a ride to last time we were on the East Shore?
So we all sit, chat about her meteorite hunting, we give her some of the crystals we picked up, she runs to the trailer park and gets us some pieces of her meteor collection - too kind - me and Chris each get a small slab - and she invites us off meteorite hunting and we invite her crystal hunting and it's a proper Kootenay love fest.
And she's telling us all about what she does - back from hunting meteorites in Africa, now here for the Boswell one, and she's telling us how much she'll make if/when she finds it, $10/gram, an estimated 50 KG of debris, HMMMMMM...
She knows what she's doing with her share...."I'm gonna buy myself a VAGINA".
This is too good. Me and Chris make a pact - we've got to find a way to introduce her to Ken.
All in all a pretty damned perfect Kootenay day.
***
The finds, cleaned up:
Large (4 inch) crystal showing some transparency.
Abundant crystal shapes and points.
flattened crystals - "Memory Keepers" or some "Record Keepers" - smaller crystals flattened into a larger one.
In the end - nothing in & of itself too worthwhile, but lots of indications that we should keep on digging...
The Big Blue (Le Grand Bleu) - Luc Besson
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
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Thought I'd watched this a long time ago, recommended it to an acquaintance, who in turn recommended back to me...
Lol.
So I watched it (again?). Most of it I didn't remember - maybe I hadn't seen it after all. It was good, reminded me of when I was young and more carefree and the world was a saner, more cause and effect sort of place. It was good, enjoyable - no spoilers - but rather affected me in a way that movies nowadays rarely do. Worthwhile.
Days Off & More Lockdowns
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
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The last day of work, then the announcement that the province would be locking down for another 3 weeks.
Strongly mixed feelings about this - on the one hand, seriously, I was dreading returning to work. Every year has been busier, poorer staffed than the one before. This year will be no exception.
On the other hand, all this free time is of no use if I can't afford a tank of gas to go exploring.
Tuesday morning, not giving a damn I've got places to be. First off, meet Stormy for breakfast, only clearly there's no breakfast with the new lockdowns, and Stormy thinks free to stand me up. I dump some parcels off for him, his scooter is there. He's expecting me to knock, at which point I'll be ambushed into taking him on 100 errands around Nelson, 100 errands, 100 KM, he just got paid after all. Nope nope nope. I'm not knocking, not today.
Onward, to work to BS about the possibility of the restaurant reopening, then on the 11:30 Ferry, meet Chris. We're off. First stop, the toxic-crystal beach at Pilot Bay, collect a few of the tiny quartz crystals that have fallen out of the processed silver ore.
From here on to Riondel.
The village, quaint old miners houses, yards filled with fruit trees and the debris of a thousand Nelson Free Piles. Everywhere. Just gather useless broken shit and pile it in your yard. It's your civic duty. Old people staring at you cautiously as you drive by, new in town, doubtless there to steal their garbage...
The Bluebell Mine. Chris is impressed, as am I, I've been here before, but returning my eye is a lot more practiced - there's limestone, crystalline, marble, quartz, feldspar (??? odd here, but this place is an anomaly), pyrites, abundant left over silver ore, some small quartz crystals...
But no means into the mine. The adit - crushed under a million tons of rockfall and debris - it's not accessible, I thought it might have been, but getting in under the ledges, great slabs of rock overhanging by a thin sliver, squeezes that probably go on to nowhere, I was deceived by the presence of bats, a bat might fit; me - no - and trying to would definitely bring down the rest of the mountain. So no. But - some silver ore, more rocks, (what for?), Chris, as usual, gets carried away and doesn't want to quit.
Finally, from here on North of Riondel, rough logging road, past Garland Bay (where it improves, the logging trucks have carved ruts that will need serious grading to fix), then up, up, up. No snow, not for a few KM, good news, stop, check the rocks, outcrops, granite and pegmatites, what I expected. Come to a shady wash of ice, park, and hike from here up. Lots of granite, lots of pegmatite, no great finds, but this is a reconnaissance, after all. The ground is relatively snow free, lots of granite exposures, lots of pegmatites, remote enough that you can be assured if it's here it might be yet undiscovered. And so we wander for an hour, stick to the road, bear scat (they're up, small little liquid blotches every 100 yards up the road, still wet, we've surprised someone...).
Then, time to head back.
We've left it a bit late, tearing down shit logging roads, aiming for the 5:30 ferry, the far side of Riondel a hitchhiker, pick her up.
"Her" in the most liberal of terms, if you know what I mean (In a deep baritone voice).
"She", it turns out, is here from the university, looking for fragments of the meteorite that fell a few years back over Boswell.
Interesting.
"Chondrite?" I ask, and she assures me that yes, it is, and so I should be able to find it with a magnet or metal detector. Bits of it I should qualify.
So we chat about that - I was following it after it happened, heard they thought it went into the lake past Riondel, only they've recalculated the trajectory and figure it ended up somewhere...
Yeah, sorry, I'm not telling. Pegmatites and meteorites.
Let her out, tear onto the ferry with seconds to spare, it's just disembarking, it wasn't 5:30, it was 5:20, and so we're there by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin, and the jeep is all in one piece.
So - 3 weeks of this I can do. The weather, gradually improving, keep local - budget 2 tanks of gas and long days on foot, and maybe, with a bit of luck and a lot of legwork I can find a reason not to return.
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