Mining in Jerome

Another artist at the Co-op told me about a public azurite claim in Jerome. Yesterday, Doug and I went to check it out. Doug enjoys going on adventures :-) I posted the pictures in the reverse order from which i intended, but oh well. After we drove around a little and then asked a woman walking her dog how to get down into the big gulch, we found blue stuff all over the palce. A few different minerals containg copper have formed around here. Azurite, Chrysocolla, and Malachite are the three most colorful. I think we found mostly Chrysocolla, which is often mistaken for turquoise, but is much softer. The above hunk of rock broke really easily with a couple whacks of my pick.

This is what it looked like after the whacking :-) I'm trying to get jewelry worthy pieces, so I was looking for smaller, flattish pieces of rock. I do not cut the stones. I like to use them as they come out of the ground. Ok, I guess whacking counts as altering...As I was whacking, I actually realized that I prefer to find the rocks already out of the ground. Doug enjoys the whacking :-)

This little pile was all soft and crumbly. I could use it in inlay work...

Cool big rock! It was too hard for us to get anything off of it with our little picks. We were in a little wash here, and found lots of cool stuff.

From the road, we could see where we needed to go, but getting there was a bit of a challenge. The only trail we saw was chained off with a sign that said "Stay out and Live" The dog walker said go ahead and use the trail, nobody minds. Gotta love Jerome :-)

I think that must be an old mine entrance. We stayed away from that....

Here's the trail we took down to the lower right side of that big gray wall under the Douglas Mansion. Must have been a little blasting going on at one time. We had a fun day, and got some cool rocks. I'm gonna double check with Brice to see if we were actually in the right spot :-) Doug thought our adventure made a good beginning to a horror movie...Going down a trail that said stay out and live, then in the movie, the people would have gone into the old mine to find some old miner zombies with picks..... Hard to swallow for me in the bright sunshine :-)