[Journal entry for March 17 and 18, Mt Apatite Park, Auburn Maine] The Mt Apatite Mine is an old feldspar mine that was operated 1902-1929. It is now part of Mt Apatite Park, owned by the City of Auburn. In the late afternoon of a sunny day, I reconnoitered the park, for Dallas and my previous visit to it was many years ago. Access to it has been improved with the construction of a small parking lot its northern end, at the end of Small Road, nearby the Andy-Valley Sno-Gypsies Club House. Furthermore, the trails are now blazed and trail maps are hung on trees at major intersections. I headed south on a woods road blazed in red. It crosses relatively level ground, though mixed woods of hardwoods and White Pine. I crossed a stream and passed several old stone walls before coming to the first mine, a small trench in a pegmatite ledge. Rock collectors had dug into the nearby mine waste piles and left numerous rock fragments strewn about. They contained opaque white feldspar (the substance that was mined), translucent white quartz, muscovite mica and (more rarely) garnet. A little further along the road, I came upon an interconnected set of open pits mines, the largest of which was perhaps fifty yards across and ten deep. Most were flooded and covered with ice, but even those that may have been dry were covered with snow. I did not venture into any, but instead walked a circuit about them, peering down into them from numerous perspectives. Large trees grew from some of them, verifying that these mines had been long abandoned. I found one spot with a prominent vein of translucent, milky-white quartz, perhaps a yard wide. I then headed back the way I came. About an hour.

The following morning, Dallas and I hiked in the park. The weather was cloudy, and light rain fell intermittently. We took the Blue Trail, which roughly paralleled the road I had taken yesterday and was located west of it. I detoured to view a small wetland, and again to visit a bare hilltop with exposed rock pavement, decorated with a small cairn and a fireplace. If this it’s the summit of “Mt Apatite”, it is a very subdued hill, indeed! We continued on the Blue Trail until we intersected the woods road (blazed in red), and took it to the mine. While we stood at the edge of one of the open pits, Dallas (who was born and raised in Auburn) recalled how she and other neighborhood teenagers jump off the pit’s rim and swim in its waters. We examined some of the stones lying along the road, finding many with feldspar, quartz and mica, and a few with garnet. We then headed back, talking first an unblazed trail west to the Green Trail, and it back north. We came across a ledge of pegmatite with black tourmaline crystals, the largest of which were about two inches long and a quarter inch wide. The Green Trail led back to the red-blazed woods road, and we took that back to our car. About an hour and a half.