Fall digging at the California Blue Pegmatite
By Ryan Bowling
Southern California is one of the Legendary pegmatite areas in the world, containing such famed localities like the Himalaya Mine and the Tourmaline Queen Mine, just to name a couple of the pegmatite’s. On the outside of the tourmaline producing areas, there lies simple pegmatite bands, containing mostly aquamarine. The California Blue is one of these pegmatites, containing aquamarine and topaz, but no colored tourmaline so far.
Dave Schmidt owns the California Blue, he found it in 2006, and has been working it ever since. Early mid-October, together with Dave, my mining partner Paul Geffner and I set out to dig the California Blue pegmatite in Southern California.
It was a beautiful morning, as we started our adventure, slowly winding our way to the California Blue through the barren desert landscape. As we arrived at the California Blue, we surveyed the pegmatite, and selected several places to dig. We started to did, and immediately we hit our first pocket, it produced only single smokey quartz crystals. We continued to dig, and over the course of the two days of mining, we managed to open up, and collect twenty pockets.
