Pyhä Tunturi – Feb 22
Feb 23rd, 2020 by rallyadmin
After last night’s excitement we sleep in until 8 and then head for breakfast. We’re hoping to see Sonya and Alex at breakfast and chat a bit before they leave for Nordkapp.
They aren’t in the restaurant but we know they haven’t left yet. Their car is still in front of their “igloo”. We start on breakfast and just a few minutes later, they come in to the restaurant. I walk over and ask them to join us.
We thank them again for helping us last night. They demur. “It was nothing. We were happy to be of help.” “No matter. We weren’t very excited with the prospect of sleeping in the car.”
I was hoping to ask them about living in Israel but Alex promptly launches in the a discussion about the world wide situation and that things must be done to stop the mass migration of poor people around the world. I’m a bit taken aback by his arguments but he/they live in a completely different environment than we do. Invasion, hostile or otherwise, is he primary concern for Israel. And their history since 1948 proves that their concerns are very well justified.
Alex is a strong, make that fervent, supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu and, therefore by extension, a fervent supporter of Donald Trump. He thinks that Obama was a disaster for Israel and Trump has been Israel’s savior. I suggest that this makes more sense if ou replace “Israel” with “Netanyahu” but he’s not having any of that.
He has been to the US and he tells me that everyone in Kansas where he visited is fully supporting Trump. I again suggest that he’s only seen an anecdotal snapshot of Kansas and the rest of the US but he’s not having any of that either.
Then he launches into a diatribe about the few Muslims in the US congress. “They want the total muslimification of the US.” “I don’t think that that is what they want but even if they did, that could never happen in the US. The Muslims are such a small minority that it could never happen.” Nope, wrong again.
Of course, no matter how adamant he is, Sonya says she lmost totally disagrees with him. She doesn’t like Bebe (Netanyahu’s nickname) and Israel has many problem that Bebe has done nothing to help solve, ie education which she claims in Israel is terrible. That aside, Alex keeps going on.
But it is a very interesting discussion and I’m glad we’ve have it. Barbara gets a bit hot with some of Alex’ statements, especially the ones that start with “I don’t mean to sound racist but…” and tend to sound very racist indeed.
But his very strong feelings are created in a culture that is consumed by the stress of living very close to people who very definitely want to destroy Israel and the Jews. We live in a country that is almost an island with huge oceans separating us from dangers both in the east (the Middle East) and the west (China and North Korea.) That affords us a very different world view than Alex’ world view.
Soon breakfast is over and they have to leave for their next stop, the better part of 800 kilometers away. It’s been a real treat meeting them and we’d love to meet them again. Alex and I trade business cards. Some day we may visit Israel. It’s on our to do list. We may just look them up.
We go back to the “igloo” and prepare to leave for a trip to the Amethyst Mine abot 25 kilometers back in Luosto. I had booked us a couple of tickets last night and we have to be there at 11:30AM for a snow train ride to the mine. It’s snowing a bit so we leave with some slack in case there are an issues en route.
Promptly at 11:30 a snow cat with a passenger sledge pulls up and about 20 of us load up. The snow cat slowly pulls out and hauls us up the hill to the mine. We stop part was at a hut that sells coffe and has a small gift shp. We buy a small bag of amethyst pebbles as an étagé souvenir. Then back in the sledge for the short ride to the top of the small mountain and the entrance to the mine operations.
At the top of the mountain there’s a great view of the surrounding area but the wind is blowing and there is a light snow falling. A guide comes out to greet us and ushers us into a building that is almost completely buried in the snow. We file in are given a cup of hot juice before we sit on some long benches facing the front of the building.
The guide, Pascal, is French and speak English very, very well but with a very strong French accent. He gives us a very informative lecture on the geology of the area and how amethyst is formed. We find out that the area where the mine is located was once a mountain on the scale of the Alps that is thought to be 2.8 billion years old. But glaciation has ground the mountain down to its current 400 meter height and that tectonic plate movement had moved the mountain some 20,000 kilometers from its site of formation.
Amethyst is formed by crystallization of silicon dioxide at extremely high temperature and pressures that are caused by first being under a large mountain and then under ice-age glaciers that were up to 3 kilometers thick. That glacier thickness results in pressures that are over 4,300 lbs per sq in. (Do the math if you don’t believe me.) And that doesn’t count for the weight of the remaining mountain.
Amethyst is actually a form of quartz. But unlike clear quartz, amethyst is comtaminated with small amounts of iron and aluminum which give it its color. The amounts and type contaminants result is the different colors of the quartz with the amethyst being mostly red and pink.
The business of the mine is another fascinating aspect of this operation. There are only 12 people in the operation, the ower and 11 others. Only 4 of them are the actual miners, the rest are gift shop workers, a jeweler and some others.
They only mine in the 4 months of the summer when the ground isn’t frozen. The rest of the year, they only do tourist visits like the one that we are on. And the tourist visits account for 60% of the annual income of the mine with the remaining 40% being generated by the actual mining operations.
Pascal gives us a quick schooling on the economics of amethyst mining. Most of the gem grade amethyst comes from Brazil which generates thousands of tons of raw amethyst yearly. This mine generates about 300 kilos per day which is what Brazil produces in less than a day. This mine survives by staying small, working in small amounts that don’t require heavy equipment (they do most of their mining by hand) and tourist visits.
But the most fascinating part of the operation’s business model are the rules that the visitors must follow to mine for their own amethyst during their short visits to the mine. The tourists are taken down a long set of stairs to the working part of the mine and at the work area, they are each given what looks like a small iron hammer (actually a piece of welded rebar that is formed into a tee shape with a long handle and a small cross piece.)
To mine you rake the broken rubble and look for small (or large) pieces of amethyst in among the broken rubble. It only takes a few pieces before you get to recognize what is amethyst and what is rubble. And Pascal is there to help you determine what you have found and, probably, to make sure that they keep anything that is really valuable. (See following mining rules for tourists.)
Each visitor can only take one piece of amethyst home and that piece must be able to fit in a closed adult fist. The larger pieces are kept by the mine. You can, however take as much quartz that is deposited with the amethyst as you acre to carry. It’s rubble to the mine and they encourage you to help them dispose of it. (I think that’s a Pascal joke. Maybe not.)
The genius in this business model is that for 8 months of the year when the mine does no actual mining they get paying tourist to mine for them and they get to keep the good stuff. Sign me up for that business model. I don’t know the actual business specifics but if the make 60% of their annual revenue off the tourists it looks like a great model to me. I wish I had thought it up.
After bout 30 minutes of plying around in the dirt nd rubble, Barbara and I have found a half a dozen pieces which Pascal examines on the way out of the mine. (See previously mentioned rules for tourist mining.) We have found one rather large piece with a few different colors of amethyst in one pie and a couple of other pieces. Pascal passes on all of them and we climb back up that stairs to the mine entrance and the waiting snow train ride back to our car.
The sun is trying to peek through the overcast on the way down but at the bottom of the mountain, the sky is still overcast and things aren’t looking good for seeing the Northern Lights tonight. Into Luosto for a great hamburger lunch and then back to the “igloo” to wait for dark.
We go to the hotel restaurant for dinner and on our way back to our “igloo”, we notice that there’s still a solid overcast. To make matters worse, there’s almost no wind. We wait until about 10 but finally give in. No Northern Lights to see tonight. Bummer.
Tomorrow, we leave Lpland as we head south on our way back to Helsinki. Maybe things will improve tomorrow.
Obi-wan
