By Patrick E. Haynes

In 1985 I took a temporary job with a construction company in Cortez, Colorado. This soon turned into a full-time position and my family packed up and moved to Cortez. We lived there for the next 19 years. During that time I was exposed to the various uranium and vanadium minerals that could be found on the Colorado Plateau. I had some neighbours that were active rockhounds and they told me that they had cousins who actively mined uranium/vanadium ore from a nearby mine, called the Repete Mine. This intrigued me and I arranged for a visit.

On the morning of November 26, 1986 I went to the mine and looked over the ore pile sitting outside one of the adits. There were three different uranium minerals in the ore. All were microscopic, but they could cover surfaces up to a few square inches. One formed tiny spheres coloured yellow to pale yellowish-green. Another was a vivid green colour, essentially fluorescent in the sunlight. The third mineral formed small pointed yellow, and rarely, orange prisms.

One of the miners came out of an adit driving a rubber-tired piece of motorized mining equipment, basically a rugged little open car with a large bucket on the rear. He dumped a load of ore and we introduced ourselves. I pointed out the various minerals observed in the ore and asked if he could take me to them. He readily agreed and I followed him into the mine. After walking less than 100' we encountered an intersection with microscopic yellow minerals on the walls and pillars. I turned off my headlamp and turned on a portable short-wave ultraviolet lamp. The mineral that fluoresced on the surface stood out a brilliant yellow-green in the darkness. It was a great indicator for locating not just it, but also its associated minerals.

I collected several flats of the uranium minerals. The yellow secondary uranium minerals occurred at just one other place inside the mine, but they were not as abundant as they were at the first intersection. During a lunch break, which followed the miners setting off a charge inside the mine, I talked with the mine crew, all three of them, regarding mineralogy, geology, mining, etc. I explained that I was a part-time mineral dealer, selling at the annual Denver Gem & Mineral show and occasionally at other venues. I promised to get the minerals identified and we agreed that I'd give them 25% of sales.

I sent samples of the minerals to Dr. Pete Modreski, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey in Denver. The fluorescent mineral was identified as Andersonite and the spheres as Boltwoodite. The third mineral had selenium in its chemistry and was unknown. It was a potential new mineral.

I made some other trips to the mine. The mine was operated by this crew from the spring of 1986 until January of 1987, when they stopped operations due to caving problems. The mine had a reputation for caving, having injured at least one miner in prior operations. This is because the ore is in the Brushy basin member of the Jurassic Morrison Formation, which are mostly soft mudstones. This formation is well-known as a dinosaur graveyard and bones can be found locally.

There were four entrances to the mine. An adit on the north side of the hill was used to install a large fan for ventilation. When the fan was removed that adit caved. Shortly after operations ceased one of the two adits on the south side caved. That left the oldest adit on the East side of the hill, which had a car squashed into its portal, and the South adit most used for the recent mining operations (and closest to the mineral specimens). Within months the adit allowing access to the underground uranium minerals started collapsing. I last got into the mine in April 1991. As far as I know I am the only person who ever collected minerals inside the mine. Boltwoodite was the only mineral readily found on the surface.

By late 1991 the remaining South adit caved, leaving just the East adit. Collecting underground now would involve squeezing past the car wedged into the East adit and navigating your way underground through the mine towards the collapsed South portals and the secondary minerals. I tried it twice. I had acquired a mine map, but unfortunately there was so much caving that I could not get up the nerve to traverse all of the rock falls to get to the South adit area. The mine was also now without any ventilation and radon levels were on the rise.

August to November of 1991 was an incredible time. I had discovered new minerals at other locations and they were getting published as well. Within 4 months the following were published: Maxwellite and Squawcreekite (later discredited as stannian tripuhyite) from New Mexico (Foord, E. E., Hlava, P. F., Fitzpatrick, J. J., Erd, R. C. & Hinton, R. W. (1991): Maxwellite and Squawcreekite, two new minerals from the Black Range tin district, Catron county, New Mexico. Neues Jahrbuch für Mineralogie, 8, 363-384), Metamunirite from Colorado (Evans, H. T. Jr. (1991): Metamunirite, a new anhydrous sodium metavanadate from San Miguel County, Colorado. Mineralogical Magazine; 55, 509-513) and haynesite (Deliens, M & Piret, P. (1991): La haynesite, sélénite hydraté d'uranyle,nouvelle espèce minérale de la mine Repete, comté de San Juan, Utah. Canadian Mineralogist, 29, 561-564).