|
Collecting at the Long Lake Zinc Mine, Parham, Ontario |
 |
 |
|
| We had been collecting in Canada for about 5 or 6 days without much sleep. Late one afternoon, we arrived in Parham, Ontario, which is so small it's barely a town. We turned left and drove north through the countryside until we located the abandoned Long Lake Zinc Mine. | The sky finally got dark and we got our first look at the large rock piles called mine dumps. Under short-wave ultraviolet the ordinary looking rocks were wonderfully colorful, glowing in fantastic combinations of red, yellow and blue. Sometimes there was white and a few other colors mixed in. |
|
Fluorescent specimens I discovered at the Long Lake Zinc Mine near Parham, Ontario Click on the minerals to see full-size. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
| Diopside (blue), Calcite (red), Chondrodite (yellow). This specimen has other colors and is in an aesthetic class by itself. |
|
|
|
 |
 |
| It had been an extremely good night - what more could a fluorescent mineral collector want? Well, just as were leaving, I spotted the aurora borealis! It was very faint though. It looked like my computer re-creation above. It was definitely the aurora because of the way it zipped across the sky. Plus I'd seen a similar aurora in Alaska. That night was the high point of the Canada trip....it just couldn't have been better! | The next day we went back to get a better look at the mine. But we didn't see anything more than the big piles of fluorescent rocks. I'm not sure what I was doing in this picture but I seem to be both tired and reluctant to leave! |
|
|
 |
 |
