I must admit that I’ve been lazy these first weeks of the New Year. No blogging and only one trip out to collect beside today’s trip… Shame on me… But here I go again, and not to disappoint the fans ;-) I’ll start with the first trip this year:

First trip

out was of course to the A/S Granit quarry, to look for more exciting minerals in the same pegmatite as in the New Years weekend. It was my first opportunity, the weekends before it was snowing, but on Saturday the 19. it was nice and warm. And it had been raining earlier the same week, so there was little snow left. The good weather tempted others to get out as well, and a few minutes after I arriwed the pegmatite, I got the pleasant company of Svein A. Berge. One of the grand experts of the larvikite area minerals. After he left and I was starting to move too, I saw another person approaching, it was Knut Eldjarn looking for treasures. We had a nice chat, before I returned home. Then to the minerals!

Most of the interesting part of the pegmatite was already removed, but there was still a lot of pegmatite material to search through. I tried to focus on “spreustein”, altered sodalite and nepheline with vugs of natrolite and thomsonite-Ca. The search trough the spreustein vugs haven’t been to exciting so far, but still got a lot of material to look through, so there still might be something of interest hiding. In the possessed material it was only gibbsite and böhmite.
Svein did discover some fist sized nodules of an eudialyte-group mineral. Pretty dark brown, looking like the ferrokentbrooksite found at Vesterøya in Sandefjord. More eudialyte-group minerals were found, also some lighter brown, almost yellow, that very well could be kentbrooksite.
Beside the spreustein and eudialyte-group minerals, I did bring home some more zircon material, extremely rich in small, nice, brown zircon crystals. The zircons were making up at least 40% of the pegmatite in those samples. They are really nice under the UV-lamp, with a strong yellow colour. Some of them are pretty strange too, being hollow!

Today

I went to Sagåsen quarry. Forgot my camera so no pictures…
Just after arriving and discovering they just had blasted a huge section, rich in pegmatite, I called another of the larvikite area experts, Ingulv Burvald. He happened to be in Tvedalen, just going to return to his home, which he of course reconsidered. So about 15 min later I got company. It’s really a lot more fun to collect when you got company!

The pegmatite looked pretty promising, rich in cancrinite, spreustein and sulphides. And after a couple of hours search through the pile of rocks, this was the minerals we found (observed): cancrinite (very rich and large, yellow samples), thorite, annite, galena, sphalerite, arsenopyrite, diaspore, natrolite, calcite, fluorapophyllite (nice yellow micro crystals that I first thought was calcite) (or is it apophyllite-(F) now?), zircon, wöhlerite, pyrochlore, analcime, a very interesting colourless crystal in a vug that Ingulv found, aegirine (covering vugs like velvet) and a pink/violet mica that might be ephesite or polylithionite.

There were some people working on in other parts of the quarry, and ten minutes after Ingulf left, they came with their huge machines and started to remove the piles, so then it was just to get the gear together and get out…

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