Geco Mine 1975

The Geco mine in 1975. The mine is probably of most interest to collectors for the gem grade Cordierite that it produced. I got a few specimens of gemmy material from a sample man who worked at the mine.

More than 20 years later I was in Elco,Nevada attend an MSHAW safety training course so I could go collect under ground in an active mine that had some interest to me. The training class was boring as hell and it quickly became evident that in most cases I knew more than the instructor did, but you had to sit through about four days of this stuff and it din't matter if you didn't know the difference between a rock and a mineral or had been a professional hard rock miner for 20 years. If you wanted to work in the gold mines around Elco or get their little piece of paper you had to attend and try and not fall asleep. The one day the instructor told the class that the man who had discovered that blood circulated in the body was a man named Agg ri col' la. I had to be a show off and raised my hand and when recognized told him that the name was Bauer whose Latin name was Agricola and said his most important work relating to mining was his work was De re Metallica (On the nature of minerals/metals). This caught the attention of a sturdy guy who had never said a word during the entire class. During a break he ask me is I knew a mineral that was blue and white at the same time. I said I didn't know of one like that, but there was a mineral called Cordierite that was blue and pale yellow and that the best locality for this mineral in North America was the Geco mine. He perked up and asked if I knew the Geco Mine and I said I did and he said he had been lead miner there for about 15 years. I ask him if he had ever seen any of the Corderite from the mine. He said, yes, he used to see it all the time in the scram. (The scram is a scraper/bucket run by cables that is used to scrape/haul ore, in this case from the bottom of an ore chute to a grizzly which is a the top of a chute covered with steel bars set a few inches apart to prevent chunks that are too big from dropping into the chute.) I ask him if you could see the mine light through some of the pieces and he said yes. I asked him large did the pieces get? He thought a moment and pointed to a 30 gallon trash can in the corner of the room and said that the pieces got that big. My jaw hit the floor. He said that he and the mine manager collected up a bunch of the stuff and he helped the mine manager build a fireplace in his home out of the stuff. So, somewhere in one of the homes in Manitouwadge there is this house with a fire place made from gem rough iolite.
[Rock Currier 2011]

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Photo added: 18th Oct 2011