Heading to the Harts Ranges

[darttrev68]

Day 4 - Woke up to a glorious sunrise over the Entia Valley. Back to the epidote today, travelled the 7.3 km from our base camp along a good station track. A bit sandy in places and I felt the car drift a couple of times.

We parked at the base of the ridge and investigated the epidote horizon we had spotted yesterday afternoon. This was on the smaller ridge to the south of the track and back about 140 metres from the main ridge. Here there was a long traceable vein of quartz with large epidote crystals growing inside it. In some sections the quartz / epidote vein had calcite filling cavities and this was often naturally etched to expose the epidote crystals. I dug on a couple of spots and uncovered small pieces with terminated epidote crystals standing free.

In places where the quartz vein widened to over 30 cm, the epidote were much larger. Digging on one of these spots uncovered a single crystal 15 cm round. Unfortunately it fractured, but I managed to get a large terminated top.

After lunch we went back to the higher ridge to follow the old workings and located some nice epidote in albite, along with clusters of small albite crystals. The coarse albite rock had large cavities where another mineral had dissolved. These turned out to be long (up to 20 cm) actinolite crystals as some smaller samples were found intact.

After spending the day digging the epidotes, our sample bags were filled and we headed back to our base camp at Valley Bore...

[MrSydney]

Great report!  Already making me dream of a trip out there!  Looking forward to some pics!

[Gemster]

  Very Nice Finds there darttrev68..... and Reports... My notebook is getting Full...

 Maybe an ALF Get-together at Harts Range Next Year Mr Sydney?... There is so much to see and do out there , you need a few weeks...
 
  Gemster...

[MrSydney]

In my dreams Gemster!  At this stage the divorce would cost me to much!

Having said that when the kids are a few years older I'm pretty positive my wife will be up for it as she is big on exposing them to different areas of the country and they are all partial to some good fossicking especially when there is actually material to find without too much difficulty.

 

[MALACHI]

Hi Trevor, I have enjoyed reading your daily reports on your mouth drooling and inspiring Harts Ranges trip.    Did you go on your own or did you have some of your Broken Hill Club fellowship tag along with you?   Gemster I like your suggestion of an ALF get together at the Harts Ranges. There has been a get together in Powelltown Victoria.
Cheers   

[Jimnyjerry]

Hi Trevor, I have enjoyed reading your daily reports on your mouth drooling and inspiring Harts Ranges trip.    Did you go on your own or did you have some of your Broken Hill Club fellowship tag along with you?   Gemster I like your suggestion of an ALF get together at the Harts Ranges. There has been a get together in Powelltown Victoria.
Cheers 

Maybe 2020  .    for luck.

Fires near home made me turn around after Eldorado when Woofa and I were on the way to the Powelltown gathering.

[darttrev68]

Day 5 - Another magnificent sunrise over the Entia Valley. Today we headed down towards Spriggs Bore on the southwestern side of the valley. We reached the boundary fence between Mount Riddock and Abalindum Stations and met a sign saying "Fossickers trespassing will be penalised". Well this put an end to our plans for Spriggs Bore, so we turned around and headed over to Shaw's deposit on the northeastern side of the valley.

Shaws deposit was 16 km from our base camp at Valley Bore, via the northern access road and a station track that turns off after crossing the main channel of Entire Creek, 7.2 km north of base, heading towards the southeast. At 15 km there is an old caravan with two steel shelters, that would make an ideal camping spot. Shaws deposit is another 1 km to the east.

Shaws deposit has both iolite (cordierite) and kyanite. The iolite is a lavender colour and mostly occurs in association with quartz seams. Some very large pits have followed the quartz and we found a very nice cuttable piece of iolite in one of these pits. My colleague pulled out a gemmy piece of it and asked me if there was amethyst here. Surprised I said "not that I know of" and looked at the piece. It was a ripper of a piece of iolite around 30 carats of cuttable gem.

We further explored the area and located the kyanite horizons. Some of this is close to the iolite diggings, while other kyanite crystals are found in a black biotite mica layer that extends to to small ridge to the south. Here the kyanite is glassy, sometimes transparent and grades from white to pale blue to bright blue. Some of the kyanite collected is vivid blue in fluorescent light and teal green in sunlight. These exist as crystals within the black mica up to 15 cm long, but most are around 5-7 cm.

After collecting our fair share of kyanite we headed back to base camp and along the way, checked out some of the quartz reefs on the side of the road back. Near the base camp was a pegmatite with a quartz core containing tourmaline crystals. Several workings were followed along the strike of the pegmatite, but as light was fading for the day we decided to check it out properly tomorrow.

Back to base camp for another quiet night around the campfire...

[darttrev68]

Day 6 - Our last day in the Entia Valley. We travelled back to the Epidote location for one last look along the horizons for well formed crystals. Following the strike of the formation along the smaller ridge, we found a section at the southern end of the ridge where very large crystals were sitting in the quartz. This spot also had calcite filling gaps and where it had naturally etched the crystal faces were exposed. A few very nice samples of thumb sized, terminated epidote crystals were collected from this location.

Back to camp for lunch, then a look at the tourmaline location on the ridge west of camp. We followed the pegmatite for around 400 metres and checked out the numerous pits along the outcrop. Pieces of quartz with spaces where large tourmaline crystals once existed, were strewn around each pit. A few nice tourmaline crystals were found, some had terminations, while others were sitting in matrix.

Back at camp we started to pack up ready to move out next morning.

[silver123]

Possible solution to lack of access to Harts Range fossicking. The Northern Territory government purchases the station and turns it into a fossicking reserve. Control is given to the Atitjere community to run tours, or charge a reasonable entry and/or camping fee, providing the community with employment and income.- Kim 

[darttrev68]

Day 7 - Left Entia Valley and headed west along the Plenty Highway towards Gemtree Caravan Park. From the Entia Valley gate we passed Harts Range (29km) and then Mount Riddock Homestead (55 km) to the turnoff into Kong Bore (61 km). The sign on the gate said "disease control" indicating that Mount Riddock had segregated some of their cattle for quarantine reasons and the gate into Kong Bore must be kept closed.

At the bore there were mica mines within sight and a grave nearby. We inspected the dumps and found a lot of mica but not much else. Apparently there is a blue quartz and beryl to be found but we couldn't see any.

A tourmaline location is noted on the southern side of the mica mines. We located the tourmaline and most was fine fibres through a very weathered rock. By chance I noticed a larger crystal in quartz and had a scratch in the dirt. What came out was astounding. Sprays of tourmaline crystals, some as large as your hand rolled out of the dirt. We opened up a small hole, 1 metre long by 30 cm wide and retrieved about 30 pieces with tourmaline sprays, the largest piece being 25 x 30 cm with 3 distinct sprays.

We then headed around the bore to a creek and followed it upstream to a sunstone location. Either we didn't find the spot or the sun was at the wrong angle, but our search for the sunstone was to no avail. We walked up the creek into a small gorge. There was evidence that a vehicle had gone up the gorge as wheel tracks were evident. It was rough going and the driver of the previous vehicle was either very brave or insane to have gone along this "track".

After nearly 2 km, we decided that our search was in vain and turned back towards the cars. A few quartz crystal leaders were found but none yielded good samples.

Back to the cars and onwards towards Gemtree. We arrived late in the afternoon, booked in for four nights and set up camp on site "beryl". We met up with a couple of fellow fossickers and compared notes about where we had been.

The evening was spent talking rocks and fossicking around one of the many campfires at Gemtree.

[darttrev68]

Without offending anyone, but your idea Kim is SO WRONG... As I went past the Spotted Tiger campsite, I noticed how un-maintained it was. This is in the control of the local Atitjere community and it is not being looked after. The idea to set it up was good, but fossickers are not a priority for the community nor the NT Government.

It would be a bad idea to give it over the Atitjere community and I have seen elsewhere, when control is given over, far too many great fossicking locations get locked up and access is denied. Once it is governed by the local aboriginal tribes, areas become men only or women only and some become strictly off limits. There is already a land rights claim underway for the whole Harts Range. Hopefully common sense will prevail and the fossicking areas will not be closed.

The government would be better to negotiate with the landholders for access to particular areas and set rules - as was applied by the fossicking permit - that all fossickers must follow. This allows the fossickers back in and the landholders know what will be expected when they visit. The permit does not have to be imposed, but a registration that you are in the area should be.

Bush camping should still be allowed and if the government want to help (which they don't), they need to maintain some of the access roads - even if it is a dozer run over the tracks every so often to keep them passable.

The other problem is that many of the access tracks are not gazetted roads, but private station tracks. This means that a breakdown of a vehicle and the cost of retrieval and fixing the ensuing road issues, falls on the landowner. This is one of the reasons Mount Riddock wants to close off Old Station Well. Unless the government does something about this, then many more areas will become off limits.

The NT government's priorities do not include fossickers. They have closed their office in Alice Springs and even though there are government signposts for fossicking areas, these are out of date and not being fixed anytime soon. 

[darttrev68]

Day 8 - Woke up to yet another magnificent sunrise, this time over the Mulga trees at Gemtree Caravan Park.

Headed out to Castle Rock - a distinctive small rocky hill, around 17 km east from Gemtree. The garnet diggings are found by following the track another 1 km to the southwest of Castle Rock and a second set of diggings occurs another 600 metres further on.

The garnets are found shedding out of a schist and by sieving the topsoil, some nice dodecahedrons can be found. We chose a likely spot and dug. Soon small dodecs rolled out and a number of nice crystals were collected. The largest, found by my fossicking colleague was the size of a golf ball.

This was my first chance to try out the "dartomatic" shaker table and it worked a treat.

After lunch we had acquired enough garnet samples, so we headed back towards Gemtree. We turned into Mud Tank and inspected the Zircon Field. After discussions with the resident fossickers, we decided that we would reserve a hole and try our luck tomorrow. As for the rest of our afternoon, we searched around the base of Specimen Hill for sharp magnetite crystals. Many of these are a result of cleavage of larger samples, but a lot are individual crystals. Some very nice, sharp crystals were found by following a black magnetite outcrop on the southern flank of the hill. In association with the magnetite is apatite. At Mud Tank, the apatite is yellow / green and forms rounded masses, some with pseudo-hexagonal shape. Several large barrels of apatite were found among the magnetite horizon.

We headed back over to an area called "the flats" where several zircon pits were being worked. We found an abandoned hole, placed a "reserved" bucket inside it and headed back to Gemtree. After collecting some firewood we settled into camp for the night, with discussions about "how to" fossicking techniques in readiness for the hunt tomorrow...

[Gemster]

Nice Reports darttrev.    .. How are the Tracks out there?

  Gemster....

[darttrev68]

Tracks are a bit rough past the Spotted Tiger campsite going into Mount Palmer. Entia Valley was good. The tracks were sandy in places but easy to follow. Some parts on the sections into the epidote and into Shaws were overgrown with high grass, but the wheel tracks were still able to be be seen. Didn't get down to the Spriggs's Bore area, so can't comment. The main road - Plenty Highway - has been upgraded and is really good near the Mount Riddock homestead. The section from there to the Harts Range Police Station is getting ready for sealing as well and could be done before you get there Gemster.
 

[darttrev68]

Day 9 - Headed over the zircon field at Mud Tank for some digging. We were given the OK from a fellow camper at Gemtree to use their sorting table (a piece of white painted steel on a 44 gallon drum) and wash buckets, so we set it up and went digging. The whole process involves digging through to the layer where the zircons are found then dry sieving to remove the fines. The next process is to wash the mud off the oversize and turn it out on the white sheet. The zircons have a distinctive glint as the sun passes through and are easily picked from the rest of the rock.

We washed several buckets of oversize and found on average five small zircons in each sieve. Among the zircons were some well formed crystals and waterworn rounded zircons with clarity.

We moved around a cubic metre of dirt from the hole for the day and washed 12 buckets of oversize to get about half a kg of zircons. Among the the samples was an 80 carat stone with a large proportion of cuttable material. There were several good sized crystals and a number of small rounded zircons that were cutters.

Back at Gemtree, a good nights sleep was in order ready for another day's digging...