Yes, it's Earth Science Week, has been all week since the 10th, will be all week through the 16th. As usual, the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology is doing it's own thing for Earth Science Week: a one-day field trip, held both this coming Saturday and Sunday, the 16th and 17th. The field trip is called, "In Search of Tufa, Tuff, and Tough Rocks." Go to that link to sign up.
These field trips are always good, are open to the public, and often have several geologists besides the main field trip leaders along for question answering. I'm sorry to say that I won't be making it this year.
For anyone interested, whether going or not, the road log for the field trip is already available online, check out some great pictures of tufa domes! On the trip - or if you follow the trip guide at a later time - you'll see tufa, tuff, and some granodiorite (the tough rocks). You'll also travel across some old Lake Lahontan shorelines, northeast of Reno, NV, near Pyramid Lake.
I've got a couple final mineral pictures from Goldfield, NV. The first two are of enargite and pyrite in a quartz matrix, with a fair amount of iron-oxide and possible jarosite. Enargite is metallic, often dark gray, and it's orthorhombic — although the crystal form doesn't show well in these examples, and instead the enargite masses look almost globular. A key feature with these enargite specimens are tiny little pyrite crystals, the pyrite being in a bipyramidal (octahedral) form. Our field trip guide said that the occurrence of bipyramidal pyrite at Goldfield was often related to enargite, and that when one sees bipyramidal pyrite, one should start looking for enargite and other ore-related minerals (and gold). Here's another example of what the enargite looks like, this time without much (or any) pyrite. Enargite is a copper arsenic sulfosalt sometimes found at porphyry copper districts and at high-sulfidationepithermal gold districts like Goldfield (also see this report on a high-sulfidation system in Mexico).
High-sulfidation epithermal gold deposits used to be called quartz-alunite deposits, because of their dominant alteration minerals. "High sulfidation," which is really an adjective but is sometimes used as a noun, isn't something you can necessarily see in the field (it doesn't always indicate the existence of a high percentage of sulfide minerals, though abundant sulfides are common in high-sulfidation systems), so I prefer the old term, quartz-alunite. That preference definitely dates me as an oldtimer.
The opposite of quartz-alunite is, generally speaking, quartz-adularia (or quartz-sericite); the opposite of high-sulfidation epithermal is low-sulfidation epithermal. The former classification system is based on descriptive field terms; the latter is ultimately chemical or geochemical.
Continuing down the pallet at Goldfield, NV, I spotted this huge rock made almost entirely of barite. This is hydrothermal barite, not the bedded barite often mined for barite drilling mud (with Nevada being the largest producer in the U.S., and third after China and India worldwide in 2008). Here's a closeup photo showing nice orthorhombic barite crystals coated with tiny druses (quartz?). Barite is often first noticed because of its high specific gravity – it's very heavy compared to other minerals and hand samples – and it doesn't fizz in HCl the way calcite and limestone do.
I've got some nice barite crystals from the Northumberland gold mine, tucked away in a box somewhere. The particular small pit my crystals came from has long since been mined.
More About Barite:
Jewell, P. W., 2000, Bedded barite in the geologic record: SEPM Special Publication, v. 66, p. 147-161 [link to abstract].
Jewell, P. W., and Stallard, R. F., 1991, Geochemistry and Paleoceanographic Setting of Central Nevada Bedded Barites: Journal of Geology, v. 99, p. 151-170 [link to abstract].
And we've got another mineral from Goldfield, NV, this time pyrophyllite, a monoclinic phyllosilicate (sometimes also reported with a triclinic form). Although often a metamorphic mineral, at Goldfield it's a hydrothermal alteration mineral. Hard to say what the original rock was, and I don't see any remanent quartz eyes or textures. Pyrophyllite can be a relatively nondescript clay-like or sericite-like mineral: white, with crystals too small to see. Compared to alunite, the feel of this pyrophyllite-rich rock was talc-like to greasy, and the sheen was pearly. I didn't try the stick-tongue method of checking for kaolinite; I presume it would fail but don't know for sure. Although crystals of pyrophyllite are more commonly seen forming radiating clusters, these crystals show a somewhat tabular form (if enlarged, this photo will be larger than the previous one). In hydrothermal areas, pyrophyllite is often mistaken for sericite, a very fine-grained white mica. If you can find masses large enough for a scratch test, it's much softer (H = 1-2) than alunite (H = 3.5-4) and slightly softer than sericite (H = 2.5). It's often worth getting an x-ray diffraction or thin-section analysis for positive identification.
We saw a lot of rocks and minerals on last month's field trip to Goldfield, NV. At the second stop, our f.t. leader had laid out a large collection of large rocks on pallets, one row for one area, one row for another. The pallets were then arranged, north to south, by the age of the rocks. I thought it was a great way of arranging the rocks, especially since we didn't have time to go see them all in the field! Today's mineral from Goldfield is alunite, a trigonal, sometimes psuedo-cubic, anhydrous alumino-potassic sulfate. In this photo, it's a hydrothermal, hypogene alteration mineral replacing potassium feldspar in rhyolite. Goldfield has some of the nicest alunite I've seen, with a classic pink color, although one can also find classic pink alunite at Alunite, Utah and other places. More alunite, still pinkish, and showing its classic tabular crystal form. If you see a mineral with this shape, think alunite. It's not always pink (or reddish); it can be colorless, white, gray, to yellowish. The supergene form is often massive, looking somewhat like jarosite.
And now a little picture break from too much writing: some more headframes, this time from Goldfield, Nevada. You can see some of GF's headframes when driving by on Highway 95, with local dirt roads (some are gated) providing closer access. And, check out the way the town looked in 1909 in this 360° panoramic view. Goldfield has a gazillion headframes — those metal or wooden contraptions that stand above shafts to underground mines. From this first area near the central part of the main Goldfield mining area, I could look north and see at least four headframes, including #1 on the left above, #2 in the middle distance above, and #3 to the east (below). Looking back to the south, I could see several, including #4 on the yellowish dumps (below). After looking at a small dig and wandering through the old buildings near that last headframe, we wandered over to the east, where we found this nice specimen of a headframe on top of a ledgy hill (same as headframe #3 in photo two). From that alunite ledge, we could look back to the west or southwest and see where we had been earlier. The two tiny-looking headframes are #4 in the distance on the left and #1 toward the middle near all the mill buildings.
A Little Terminology: Shaft: a vertical or near vertical entrance to an underground mine, which has been sunk from the surface down. The headframe above the shaft provides haulage of the ore and waste to the surface, and access in and out of the mine.
Adit: a horizontal or near horizontal entrance to an underground mine. Sometimes these are inclined slightly upwards going in to provide for water runoff or mine dewatering if needed.
Decline: an entrance that declines downward at a relatively shallow angle, as in a spiral ramp, providing for entrance and exit on foot or by truck, or an entrance that declines at angles greater than 15 degrees or more. With steeper angles, a decline will often have a ladder (yikes!) or some kind of hoisting arrangement as with a shaft. Sometimes declines are called inclined shafts (which I was taught was improper).
Tunnel: a tunnel is similar to an adit, being a horizontal or near horizontal entrance, but to be a tunnel, the passageway must pass through a hill or mountain to the other side. The word has sometimes been used used casually to refer to any kind of underground mine excavation that is tunnel-like in dimension (square to circular in diameter and long in extent), and is sometimes used interchangeably (and improperly) with adit.
This headframe-ore bin from the mercury diggings at the [Paradise Peak] mine-site provides a strong contrast to the mining and ore processing techniques used in the industry today. The bucket was used to lower miners into the shaft and to lift out mercury ore which was then dumped into the ore bin for later handling. Though the technology of mining has changed, the perseverance and determination of the Nevada Prospector has never wavered. FMC Corporation has preserved this headframe - ore bin in recognition of Nevada Prospectors' dedication to their profession in years past, present, and future and for their continuous contributions to the mining industry. [sic]
Whew! I think the sign verbiage must have been written by someone in the PR office back east.
There are several interesting stories behind this sign, which is located just outside the fence of the old Paradise Peak Mine millsite about eight miles south of Gabbs in west-central Nevada (MSRMaps aerial B&W, Google Maps aerial color). One story tells of the old mecury miners, who stopped their underground diggings within 50 feet (or less) of gold ore, not knowing it was there; another story tells of the two Nevada Prospectors who brought company geologists into the district, which caused the claims to be staked, which caused the soil samples to be taken, and so on. There are many stories about the discovery of the gold deposit, about the geologists who discovered it, and about those who didn't. I won't get into all of them here — I'd need to do just a little more research. One discovery story keys in on the several names by which the ore deposit has been known.
After gold was discovered outcropping on top of a small, now mined-out hill, the geologists who did the discovering exclaimed, "Even a blind pig could have found it!" They said this because the mineralized knob or small hill was easily visible from the Pole Line Road — the main dirt road between Gabbs and Tonopah — and because rock samples from the top of the hill contained as much as 0.25 ounces per ton gold. (I think some samples ran as high as 0.35 opt Au.)
The unnamed knob was located near the north edge of the Granny Goose Well 1:24,000 quadrangle — the knob was split in half by two topo maps, and it was within three miles of the corner of four sheets, thereby meeting one of the rules every mine needs to meet (see below). The mine was first called "Granny Goose" or "The Goose" for short, named after the well or the topo sheet. Corporate types back east decided that "The Goose" didn't match their company image, so various fake names, labels, and other appellations were considered until the alias "Paradise Peak" — stolen from a nearby, often snow-covered peak located several miles to the northeast — was selected. The topographically misleading name fooled a few geotypes into looking for the newly discovered deposit in a totally incorrect location.
In order to preserve some sense of accuracy, and to register outrage at the incorrect labeling of their gold deposit, certain geologists wore football jerseys sporting the team name The Goosers, and some wore baseball caps imprinted with hill, headframe, and the saying, "Even A Blind Pig Could Have Found It!" Sometimes the knob was called Blind Pig Hill, most often it was just called The Knob.
The hill is entirely gone now, replaced by a relatively small hole in the ground. Stripping ratio, because the ore deposit stuck almost completely out of the ground the way it did, was almost negative (well, not really, that's a mathematical impossibility).
Be located within 5 miles of a paved road. ✓The ore deposit was 2 air miles from pavement, 5 miles on dirt from pavement, and less than a mile from a main gravel road.
Be located at or near the corner of 4 topo sheets. ✓In fact, the ore deposit was bifurcated by two topo sheets and within three miles of the corner of four.
Be located less than 30 miles from a bar. ✓The knob was about 7 miles from a then active, now defunct bar and mini-mart.
The now defunct bar, where many rounds of no-slop, bank-the-eight were played (Austin Rules).
This view, from two weeks ago when I was on the second of two meeting-related field trips, looks northwest across Gabbs Valley and Alkali Flat toward Pilot Cone and the Denton-Rawhide Mine (MSRMaps). Gabbs Valley is the green area in front of the first set of hills; Alkali Flat is the white alkali flat behind the first set of hills and in front of the second set. Pilot Cone is the dark, cone-shaped hill on the horizon; the Denton-Rawhide Mine, which was mined for gold in from 1988 to 2003, is the light-colored area to the right of that knob (click to enlarge).
Somewhere, almost straight away in the distance behind Rawhide, is the "lost" gold mine I described two years ago.
Thirty years ago today, Mt. St. Helens erupted, blowing away it's almost perfectly formed Cascade volcano cone in a large lateral blast to the north, felling trees with the blast and with a resulting pyroclastic surge or flow, sending an ash column 19 km into the atmosphere, and sending debris avalanches, lahars, and mudflows into the Toutle River and others. A map of the devastation area can be seen here.
USGS Photograph taken on May 18, 1980, by Austin Post.
For an exhaustive supply of before, during, and after May 1980 photos of Mt. St. Helens, go to this page of the CVO Website; Ron Schott, of Ron Schott's Geology Home Companion Blog, has an August, 2009 Gigapan of Mt. St. Helens right here.
Two things immediately happened in my world upon the climactic eruption of Mt. St. Helens. First, my SO (at the time called "POSSLQ") — later husband, later deceased husband — immediately left for eastern Washington to make an ash-sampling traverse across the state using his VW bug, a field vehicle that was impervious to ash fallout because of its oil-based air filtration system.
USGS Photo courtesy of Washington State Department of Transportation, 1980.
Second, the district manager at Northern Exploration Comapny (NEC) released two company Broncos so we could, on our own time and dollar, drive to the volcano.
All told, there were eight of us: a couple permanent geos and a half dozen contracts types.1 We were young, all of us in our late twenties to maybe early thirties, and we were ready for adventure, or would be as soon as we could get out of the office. After grabbing some topo maps and the keys to the two Broncos — one mine, the other belonging to our pfearless leader [sic] — we loaded up some company camping gear: a large, manager-type tent that would sleep more than eight comfortably, and whatever else hadn't already been "64NZ3D" [this "word" is based on someone's real name] appropriated by a certain outlaw geologist.
We piled in and headed north. Mt. St Helens had just blown, the company was providing the means for us to go check it out, we were excited at the prospect of the trip.
North from Reno we went, stopping in Lakeview, Oregon, to fill the Broncos with many six-packs of relatively cheap beer (think: Bud, Bud Lite). We drove up the back side of the Cascade (that would be the east side for those of you not familiar with local terminology), stopping briefly at Mt. Hood. We camped, and awoke the next day under cloudy skies.
On that cloudy second day, a couple or three days after the eruption, we continued what would be a mostly overcast field trip by crossing the Columbia River, probably on I-5. We thought we'd attempt secretive, backroad entrance to the volcano from the southeast side, which was away from the blast zone, and which we figured (incorrectly) would be less heavily guarded. Those Forest Service and other roads in to the mountain were all blocked off — though with our topo maps and the first Bronco driver as acting leader, we drove up every road shown. Each road was blocked by manned barricades — the USFS (or others?) didn't want any people going in only to have to be rescued or worse. "But we're geologists!"
Nothing we tried worked, and we hadn't attempted getting in through USGS and university contacts (and I'm not sure those contacts could have helped anyway). Still, we kept attacking the problem, painstakingly checking out each and every road on our maps, however small or jeepish they appeared to be.
Finally! We found an unblocked road! We drove in, expecting to hit a barricade, literally, at any second. After winding our way through fairly dense trees, the dirt road turned back to the south, and — typical field experience — we came up on the wrong side of one of the roadblocks!
"Where are you coming from?" "How did you get in here?" We had to explain that we came in on a road they hadn't closed off. Displeased with us, and having already seen us drive up to the south side of their blockade less than an hour beforehand, they moved the orange and white contraption aside and let us through, with a warning: don't try that again.
We were disappointed not to get in farther, but pleased that we'd managed to crash the gates, even if only for a mile or two.
We gave up on the southeast non-entrance attempt, and drove over to the west side of Mt. St. Helens, thinking that we could at least get a look at her blown top from a distance. No luck! She was still hidden by clouds. The access roads in from that side brought us a little closer, but they never delivered us a view of the volcano. Instead, we found our way up the Toutle River. We talked to a couple local landowners who had experienced some mud-flood damage, drove around a bit, and took a few photos.
USGS Photograph of I-5 bridge (below) taken on July 6, 1980, by Lyn Topinka. Other I-5 bridge photos with people and stop sign (above) taken May 21±, 1980 by DMCS.
After the day's excursion, we drove south into Oregon, picked a campsite, drank some beer while hanging around the campfire in the off-and-on light drizzle, and in the morning — with the weather and views not looking any better — we drove back to Lakeview to turn in our empties for the highest can deposit around (Oregon), thus saving a few bucks.
It was a rowdy, fun, good time — with singing, drinking, and story telling — but all we saw was a muddy, lahar-flooded river, a few washed out roads, drizzle, and lots of barricades.
1Contract geos at NEC fell somewhere between temporary help and permanent geos in status, longevity, and benefits. Contracts were unrelated to consulting; they usually lasted one year and were renewable. We wouldn't see all the benefits unless they kept us on through a five-year vesting period, which didn't happen unless you were promoted to permanent status.
Earth Science Week started yesterday, and I noticed that not a single thing is listed under "What's Going On" for the entire state of Nevada. (I also noticed in general that much of the Earth Science Week website is still focused on 2008, with many links either broken or linking to events and sites from last year.)
Actually, I've been a little bamboozled by Earth Science Week this year. It almost always overlaps with the Annual GSA meeting, which is of no concern to me in years when I don't go. This year, however, I am going, so I inconveniently didn't plan anything for Earth Science Week.
I belatedly noticed that the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology (NBMG) scheduled their Earth Science Week field trips for this last weekend, meaning that the field trips ran on Saturday and Sunday, October 10th and 11th. And I missed out! I have gone on these field trips on more than one occasion, and have found them enjoyable. They are open to the public, and kids, families, and school teachers are especially welcome. Local geologists from the Geological Society of Nevada (GSN), accompany the trip as informal field trip guides to help answer questions (and to learn more about new areas they might not have visited).
This year's field trip was called "Digging Deeper into the Comstock." An online road log is available, so you can take the trip on your own sometime (or at least part of it), whenever it is convenient.
Next year, I'm going to have to mark my calendar much earlier in the year. I had assumed that the field trips would run while I was away at GSA, so by the time the announcement came out, I had already made other plans. And, anyway, the last month turned out to be a little hectic in some ways.
Because I'm not doing anything for Earth Science Week myself this year, I'd like to point you to a few sites of interest:
After lunch, the two field trip buses took us from Getchell down to Pinson. All 79 of us (more or less) then stood near the edge of the Pinson CX pit and looked in, while a guy who acted like the safety guy went around trying to get us to back away from the edge. Prior to this pit overview, we viewed some posters and examined some nice-looking, high-grade drill core.
The stitched-together photo above looks mostly west: southwest to slightly north of west from left to right. Miscellaneous equipment and things in the pit are related to currently suspended underground development and exploration, and possibly to ongoing dewatering. Above, a closer view looking at the north part of the CX pit. The mine dump in the upper right part of the photo is a dump from some old tungsten workings. The upper benches of the pit on the northwest side (right) are in unconsolidated alluvium. And this is what it looks like on the next to bottom bench of the CX pit: a geology field trip invasion. Geologists on this kind of field trips do a lot of talking and, for some reason, seem to want to examine rocks when the buses are trying to leave! And why did we go down there, besides the fact that it was there? To look at rocks and to argue over features like this one, above: was the feature caused by soft-sediment deformation or by post-lithification structural deformation? Keep in mind that these rocks are Cambrian or Ordovician, that they were around during two orogenies during the Palaeozoic, have been intruded and contact-metamorphosed during the Cretaceous, and were mineralized and subjected to Basin-and-Range extension during the Tertiary. The immediate pit area is cut by so many faults that developing and maintaining the underground workings has been difficult to say the least. Geologists on the trip did not reach an agreement about the origin of the deformation seen at Pinson. Some agreed that the answer might be both: soft-sed and structural.
Scale for that last photo is unclear, but the plants are probably very small ones (smaller than my hand).
Continuing with somerecentposts showing photos of a field trip to the Humboldt Range and Osgood Mountains of northwestern to north-central Nevada, here's a stitched together photo of the Getchell pit, a scenic place that we stopped for lunch.
The pit follows the Getchell Fault zone, which overall strikes north-south to NNW and dips about 50 degrees to the northeast in the mine area. Timing of motion on the Getchell Fault is complex to unknown, with sub-horizontal slickensides overprinted by steeply dipping slicks. Gold has been mined primarily from sedimentary rocks of the Cambrian Preble and Ordovician Comus Formations in both the hangingwall and footwall of the fault. Dark-colored rocks are mostly unoxidized, strongly carbonaceous sedimentary rocks in the footwall of the Getchell Fault; the light-colored gooey-looking mass in the hangingwall of the fault is oxidized granodiorite that is flowing slowly into the pit. This relatively smooth surface in the southern part of the pit shows the fault relatively well. The rocks are probably granodiorite in the footwall of the fault, but I won't swear to it, because we didn't get to check it out. I can imagine that I see sub-horizontal lines in this photo (slickensides?), but again, I don't really know for sure; the sub-vertical lines are probably drip lines from runoff but could conceivably include slickensides.
Reference:
Marlowe, K. E., Wood, K. Y., Loranger, R., Martin, D., Pinguely, R., and Reynolds, M., 2009, Geology, mineralization and exploration of the Getchell and Pinson deposits, Humboldt County, Nevadain Ressel, M. W. (ed.), 2009 Spring Field Trip Guidebook: Diverse Gold Deposits of the Osgood Mountains and Humboldt Range, North-Central Nevada: Geol. Soc. Nevada Special Pub. 49, p.51-61.
Just a few more photos from the western Nevada field trip I went on earlier this month: driving to Reno on Highway 50, then on the bus from Reno to Winnemucca on I-80. Wonderful spring flowers just east of Bob Scott Summit, looking south toward some of the snow-capped peaks in the Toquima Range, including Mt. Jefferson, the sixth highest peak in Nevada (sometimes called third). Here, I'm headed straight for a large dust storm, which was south of the highway at Fallon, so I missed going through it. I'm on the bus, now, passing by one potential thesis area from long ago, on my way to the area I studied. This is Rocky Canyon of the Humboldt Range, with the white cliffs being part of a granitic stock.
For today's Friday Photos, first we have the above stitched-together photo of the Getchell Mine area (MSRMaps location), looking southwest to west towards the northern part of the Osgood Mountains. I was on a recent geology field trip to the area when I took these photos. A head-frame in the distance near the main Getchell mine buildings. Getchell is about 9 kilometers (5.5 miles) north of Pinson. And in the foreground, a northeast-trending fault in the Turquoise or Turquoise Ridge pit. Too bad the field trip didn't take us into this pit to look at the fault!
The Pinson adit, from whence came jasperoid hand samples for my thesis, no longer exists - it was located in the northwest portion of what is now the A Pit of the Pinson Mine, near the bridge area between the A and CX Pits.
North is up in this air-photo image from a recent field trip to Barrick's Pinson Mine; the scale bar is 1000 feet. This digital photo of the paper image shown on the field trip contains some minor distortion due to operator error (mine!). The air-photo appears to be identical to what you can see on Google Earth, with one exception: Google Earth wraps the air-photo image over older topography, which looks strange when you try to view the existing pits using an oblique angle.
The shed or old barn where the samples were stored is likewise no longer in existence. It was located in the main drainage - Granite Creek - north of the combined A and B Pits, possibly about where the trees or shrubs in the creek are still present. In this MSRMaps map, the shed was located about where the old road crossed Granite Creek. The Pinson Pit in the MSRMaps image is the original, 1980's A Pit [from a map dated 7/1/1988 according to my original link]; the smaller-than-now A Pit is where the adit was located. The adit was put in by the Cordex I Syndicate in the early 1970's, prior to my sample collecting in 1976.
While collecting samples, I stayed at the home of Fred and Dorothy Barnes on the site of the then inactive Getchell Mine, in a house that is probably not there anymore. In order to call their house, you had to get an operator to ring Getchell #1 or Getchell #2. From outside Nevada, one of the last states using toll stations or ring downs (into at least the mid 1980's - or early 1990's?), you had to tell the operator to put you through to a Nevada operator. Out-of-state operators generally didn't believe numbers such as Midas #2 and Coaldale #1 still existed, and would insist that you give them an area code and a 7-digit phone number.
Taking a clue from GeologyJoe at Slingshot Thought, I realized that today is the first day of Earth Science Week! The theme this year is No Child Left Inside, so go out and check out something related to Earth Science. The official Earth Science Week 2008 website has quite a number of ideas.
If you happen to be in Nevada, and especially if you are in the Reno area, you can go on one of NBMG's Earth Science Week field trips, which will be held October 18th and 19th. If you are a geo-type, you can usually sign up to be an unofficial field trip leader. Either way, sign up and go! I will not be able to make it this year because of previous commitments (think: work), but know from previous experience that many of these stops are well worth going to!
A meme of sorts has been started: What was your first geology field trip - by Geology News, and What was your first geology tool, by the Lost Geologist.
On the first subject: I took many field trips at very young ages to places like Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, and Crater Lake, and also traveled across the country at the age of 5 collecting rocks from roadcuts (I may still have a few of those rocks). My first formal geology field trips took place during my third quarter of college (1971) and in the years immediately following. Many of the field trips were short affairs, going to roadcuts to draw the structure, seeking out stream bottoms to find outcrops of mostly Ordovician strata and finding occasional trilobites while doing so, and traveling across the wide, green countryside looking for thrust fault erratics. One trip that stands out particularly in my mind was a trip taken during an Economic Geology class to a kyanite mine. Perhaps this trip stands out because not only was the kyanite fun to collect, it was probably my first tour through a mine and mill. I don't have any pictures from that trip as far as I know. The photo above is a picture of the largest producing kyanite mine in the world at Willis Mountain, Virginia; it is probably the mine we went to on the field trip. More photos of the kyanite mine and the countryside surrounding it can be found at Talking Proud.
The company mining the kyanite, Kyanite Mining Corporation, is the same company that was producing in the 1970's. Their history, more photos, and a bit about how kyanite is now processed can be found through links on their home page.
On the second subject: the first geology tool that I remember thoroughly was my dad's Brunton compass (I probably had a rock hammer and hand lens prior to field camp; those are long gone). I first had use of that compass when I went to field camp in 1973; I kept the Brunton and used it for work for a very long time, into the 1980's, when I was finally given a company compass to use. Sometime after that, I reluctantly returned the old Brunton compass to my dad; he presumably has been using it to carefully measure strikes and dips up and down all of Alaska's many paved roads, and possibly up and down the Alcan. Now, if he will submit a photo of the compass to this blog, I will duly post it. (The posting of that photo might have to wait until I get a new computer; I have only limited means when editing these posts, and adding photos after posting is something I don't think is possible under current operating conditions - no cursor movement!)
Yes, it's Earth Science Week, has been all week since the 10th, will be all week through the 16th. As usual, the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology is doing it's own thing for Earth Science Week: a one-day field trip, held both this coming Saturday and Sunday, the 16th and 17th. The field trip is called, "In Search of Tufa, Tuff, and Tough Rocks." Go to that link to sign up.
