One of the primary ingredients of ganite, and the base stone for many various gems (just add color), is quartz.  Most of the quartz at the quarry was of the smoky variety, and even these samples show a little bit of the smoky hue.

Looking at those leaning rock walls, I can see why!  Periodically this pit is blasted, and the rubble is hauled out and dumped in rockpiles for the treasure hunters to pore over.

See that firehose on the ground there?  Occasionally the pit is flushed out, sending scads of interesting minerals everywhere.

Here's the rock hammer I bought at Perhams of West Paris.  It cost $40.  Ouch!  I'm told the gift shop is where Perham's makes all of its money.

Since they offer access to the quarries for free and you are allowed to keep whatever you find with no charge, I suppose I can't blame them for charging a lot for tools folks might buy.

Look at the size of these biotite mica inclusions in this boulder!  Nice contrast.  I'm not used to seeing biotite mica chunks this size… usually I only see it as the tiny black flecks in granite.

I couldn't find any beautiful unmarred crystals of this stuff of course, I'm sure all of that has already been hauled away, so I contented myself with these chunks of smoky quartz in various shades of brown.

These rich green inclusions are tourmaline, a semi-precious stone.  None of this is gem quality of course and all of the pieces are quite small, but it was one of the nicer finds of the day.

When I first saw this purple color I thought I had found amethyst, but instead it turned out to be a chlorite encrustation called cookite.  I loved the color though, and chipped off these pretty samples you see here, including one that had an angular quartz crystal in it (top center).

It was very hard work chipping in the rockpile, and very hot.  This shade tree was much appreciated!  I sat under this tree while chipping out chunks of purple cookite.

Apparently cookite comes in many colors, white, green, yellow, tan, purple… and also pink.