Sunday, take the sane Italian waiter for a hike up to the plain of the Six Glaciers behind Lake Louise. It's been a long winter, mild, but too much work, not enough prospecting, this isn't strictly speaking a prospecting trip, but I'd like to take a look at some different rocks and start getting back into shape.
Almost 9 KM from Lake Louise to the Plain of the Six Glaciers, 18 round trip, the Tea Hut is closed...It's good I didn't know this, or chances are we wouldn't have went...Sometimes it's good to go into things blind. The trail, a lot of snow past the 4 KM mark, the weather, fine, warm even, ...
The View up the Mountains...
The View from 8.6 or thereabouts KM of the Chateau Lake Louise...
Some pretty ferns opening beneath some rocks...
And, finally, at the 4 KM marker on the way home...
Meanwhile, I'd spent the half hour up at the Plain of the 6 Glaciers trying to reacquaint myself with hardrock geology, looking for indicators of, well, anything...
Merely keeping a hand in...
And I found these:
Under the microscope, a Volcanic / Gaseous filled granular "pumice like" stone, out of what appeared to be quartzite. Upon magnification it looks a bit crystalized and mineral rich...
Perfect specimens of minute bits of black garnet on quartz matrix. By minute I mean neither of these garnets would approach a mm in size, tiny, amazed I spotted them really, but they stood out in the grey uniformity of glacial till, limestone and mudstone....
And this, smaller by far even than the garnets, but a chromite or tiny mineralization in the Quartz, beautiful color, could there be emeralds nearby? Mind you, they'd have to be a hell of a lot larger than this...