I was out on a collection trip with my partner and met up with some of his contacts in Oregon. Wow these miners are a great bunch of guys for sure. We met with Cecil Coons at his Fire Obsidian claim(s) on Glass Butte, Reggie Kemp, and Dale Huett.
So, another thing we did was spend a day working for free in the Blue Mountain Jasper mine. I mean IN IT, with the owner Dale Huett and another well know mine owner Reggie Kemp. Dale was running the excavator to flatten out where the driller was drilling holes for the blasting next week. Yes, the driller was drilling blasting holes and setting the charges while we were literally walking over the blast holes which are filled with the blasting mix!
Reggie and I were the spotters for any of the Jasper nodules that the excavator uncovered. It was brutally dusty hard work and the nodules look almost identical to every other rock dug up. It took me about two hours to get to the point I could spot them with a fair degree of certainty.
We worked a solid 9 hours and only uncovered about 250 pounds of the Jasper nodules. It is like looking for a dozen rasins in a loaf of bread the size of a refrigerator!
We flattened at least an acre for blasing and built about a 1/10 mile of road into, around and out of the blast area.
Working a mine was on my "bucket" list of things I wanted to do. I got no discount and paid $25. a pound for three nodules I found - 20 pounds. Dale has a partner backing the project and it is a big dollar project with just the blasting costing $35,000. so no one gets a discount. Dale did tell me that two of the three I went out with would not have been left in the mine run he sells for $25.00 a pound. They would have gone into the "cream" selection that is not being sold. He also gave me two smaller ones I had found as a "gift" for toughing out a difficult day.
Here are some photos of the Excavator dumping a bucket while Reggie and I watch for nodules and some photos of the matrix stone. Dale says it right when he told me it would be like looking for a few raisins in a loaf of bread which would probably be the size of a refrigerator.