Last Tuesday I was invited out on an evening gathering with Dr. Wilfried Steffens and Svein Arne Berge, in . Such an invitation is just impossible to say no to!

Well I found them up at level 1 (se my article), working at the slope of a new blast, looking for chiavennite. The pile of rocks looked really unstable, but I took the chance to climb up to the pegmatite. It didn’t take long time before I found some chiavennite, looking really bright since it was wet. It turned out to fade quite a lot when it dried back home…

On the way down we stopped at a block I had been working on with André Robbemond earlier this summer (23. July to be exact). Had found something either being apatite-(CaF) or hambergite (got to work on that ID some more), but if it’s hambergite it’s very interesting since there are some white crust on some freestanding crystals in cavities – sphaerobertrandite I hope… Beside there where crystals of arsenopyrite or löllingite, thorite – also as very small crystals and probably crusts of bastnäsite.

Svein Arne and Wilfried went to check on a pegmatite loaded with fluorite, on the same level as the block (level 3), while I went down to level 5 where they just have blasted an area, and some large pegmatite boulders caught my attention immediately. I wasn’t the first to look at them, there where some samples put on a shelf on one of the blocks that showed somebody had been there before me. It didn’t take me long time before I called for Svein Arne and Wilfried. It was rich in cavities in albite, with a clay/chlorite mineral with a bright green colour, but the most interesting was actually some massive chalcopyrite. Chalcopyrite is pretty rare in the area, so it it made us all happy. Back home it also turned out to be some secondary minerals on it as well, probably malachite. Then it started to rain and we went satisfied down to the cars. It’s always a pleasure being out in field with Svein Arne and Wilfried, and I hope we’ll have many more trips out to collect in the future!

Then about today, I was originally thinking about going back to on Wednesday, but then I went to , the Japanese-law twin was to exciting a find to be forgotten… But today I managed to get back to the quarry. I forgot my camera, so pardon me for not posting any pictures of the pegmatite, the bright orange chiavennite covered rocks, etc…

But it turned out to be a very good decision to go back and look for more chiavennite. I overlooked two more spots with chiavennite on Tuesday, and in one of these (actually it was all the same vein in the pegmatite, but only accessible on different spots) the mineral occurred in rich crystal aggregates, each aggregate up to 1 mm, but covering large areas (take a look at the first picture). Not thinking about the colour (not so good – rather brownish) it’s some of the best chiavennites I’ve seen coming from the Tvedalen area since the 1980’s. And It was so much of the fracture-filling chiavennite (se the third picture) that I could have carried hundreds of kilos of samples down from the pegmatite, but I only have two arms and one back, so I had to leave a lot behind, selecting the best vuggy material, and a couple of larger cabinets with crust. Now It will be exciting to see how much the colour will be fading…

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