By Steve Chamberlain

Contributing Writer

In early May I gave an invited lecture at the fourth annual New England Mineral Conference (NEMC) between Bethel and Newry, Maine.

This was my first visit to this part of Maine, and the assistance of AAA in choosing a route was invaluable. All the major highways seem to run north-south and getting east-west is more challenging. This event is a self-proclaimed progeny of the Rochester Mineralogical Symposium, which I have led for more than three decades. I can confirm that the basic ambience and objectives are certainly the same for both events. NEMC, however, is held in the middle of a hotbed of amateur and professional mineral collecting and mining, so the detailed approach has been adapted.

Friday saw 500 children from local schools attend hands-on workshops conducted by the volunteer staff of the NEMC organizing committee. Their ultimate objective is to have 2,000 school children attend each year. This is critical to keeping amateur mineral collecting alive going forward. Saturday was more familiar, with invited lectures, exhibits, benefit auctions, etc. Sunday was all field trips to local sites.

This event was held at the Grand Summit Hotel and Conference Center at the Sunday River Ski Resort. Not being a skier, I had never heard of this place, but it is impressive. Five adjacent mountain peaks, 135 trails and the best system for creating and maintaining snow artificially, if nature fails, in the world.

They estimate that in the 2016-2017 ski season, as many as 600,000 people will come to ski and enjoy the various winter activities. I’m impressed. Now, of course, they are working on finding uses for the facilities in the off season, and the NEMC is one of many off-season events. The facility is perfect for the purpose except that it is really in the middle of nowhere. As I was getting ready to leave, I discovered that there is an even larger and more luxurious second hotel and conference center another mile or so up the mountain. It is newer and more expensive, but reservations fill up there first. This is really big business.

While there, I was able to visit the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum (MMGM) in Bethel. This new facility will open to the public in May, 2017, and will be a must-see for mineral collectors. They will feature the finest collection of Maine minerals in existence as well as a major meteorite collection (they are currently looking for the meteorite that fell in northern Maine a few weeks ago). The museum is led by Dr. Carl Francis, retired curator at Harvard, and has a major research laboratory staffed by Dr. William (Skip) Simmons, Al Falster, and Myles Felch — all familiar names to mineral collectors as some of the best researchers in the business. They have just begun offering a fee-based mineral identification service, for example.

Some of the talks on Saturday at the NEMC were given by owner/operators of pegmatites being commercially mined for gemstones, mostly tourmaline. Along with San Diego County, California, this area of Maine is the major producer of gem tourmaline in the U.S.

So, for example, the Havey Quarry near Poland, Maine, is currently producing really excellent gem tourmaline in various shades of green. These yield highest-quality cut stones. The pegmatites on Mt. Marie near Paris, Maine are also producing gem tourmaline material, but the color range includes blue, green, pink and champagne. The tourmaline crystals are zoned and the unusual champagne color comes from the center of some tri-colored crystals that more often are pink in the center.

I got a chance to inspect some of the larger cut stones of this color in person, and they are absolutely fabulous. Moreover, one of the pegmatites on the mountain is producing gem tourmaline rough that, when cut, seems to have a luminosity unusual for tourmaline. Preliminary optical studies have failed to explain the phenomenon, but I saw the cut stones of all colors and they are indeed especially stunning at normal light levels. If you want unusual facetted tourmaline stones to set in jewelry, look for those from Mt. Marie. They are really special. The NEMC really stoked my enthusiasm for things found in the earth!