|
COPYRIGHT 2006 The Mineralogical, Inc.
[January 28-February 12]
Sometime during the early hotel-show period, we Tucsonans had our hundredth consecutive day without rainfall. Already in Arizona's back country there are forest fires, and although temperatures in town remained in the 60's and 70's one could spot by the roadsides some sad brownings and wrinklings, even of otherwise hardy-looking bearpaw and saguaro cacti. Amid organic nature's distress, however, the supply of fine minerals that was on view is best described (in the established cliche) as a "flood"--few major new discoveries were on hand, but the sense was still of a great ongoing abundance.
Marty Zinn's Arizona Mineral and Fossil Show again was held at the Smuggler's Inn, Clarion and InnSuites hotels (these were for mineral people: fossilists hung out largely at the Ramada). This multi-location hotel show will undergo some reshuffling for 2007, but this year it was still well-attended and flourishing as usual.
The Executive Inn show, once part of the Zinn enterprise but now under direct management of the hotel, was also worth a checkout. And out on the "funky row" (as I call it) of motel shows along I-10, the cruiser on foot could find, besides the odd interesting crystal specimen, anything lapidary, souvenirish, or arts-and-craftsish he may desire: my wife recommends particularly the Huichol artworks, with special attention to the polychrome crescent moons, lizards and snakes.
Dave Waisman's small, elite Westward Look show on the north edge of town has been operating for four years now, under the concept of showcasing just 25 or so high-end dealers who set up in hotel rooms in a series of alcoves in a resort complex, amid gorgeous desert scenery. The show also offers a special exhibit each year (this time it was Irv Brown's super collection of pegmatite minerals), and one evening of socializing and lectures in one of the hotel's conference rooms (this year, Steve Smale and Bryan Lees gave slide talks on their favorite mineral specimens and major specimen-mining projects respectively). Dave Waisman plans to keep the Westward Look show at its present size, for he thinks, justifiably in my view, that an ideal balance between an "elite" atmosphere, an open-to-all display of mineral beauty, and an educational-social agenda, has been achieved. But plan carefully for this one, so you don't miss it: Westward Look goes on for only five days in the very middle of Showtime, and its venue is located pretty far from the general center of gravity.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
And finally there is the accustomed climax at the Tucson Convention Center, the "main show," where Minerals of Canada was the theme this year. All of these productions and more are in general what Tucsonans mean by "The Show" (or, as they all somewhat annoyingly say, "The Gem Show"); and surely the whole thing is, as is often said of the Grand Canyon, an experience which everyone owes him or herself, at least once in a lifetime.
And now to set out on the what's-new tour ...
The Commodore mine at Creede, Colorado has long been known for producing what are probably Colorado's best sphalerite specimens. The Tucson Show of 2002 saw a generous offering of an old hoard of sphalerite/galena/chalcopyrite specimens which had been dug in the mine in the 1960's (see vol. 33, no. 3, p. 262), and in 2004, Robert Stoufer of Colorado Minerals (www.ColoradoMinerals.com), in partnership with the Collector's Edge specimen-mining crew, took out about 1000 fine new specimens showing sphalerite crystals to 5 cm which are lustrous and gemmy yellow-brown, as in Commodore mine specimens past. These crystals share matrix space with drusy amethyst and with lustrous, compound galena cubes to 1 cm that are alive with bright, sharp right angles. In a room at the InnSuites, Colorado Minerals offered very attractive specimens of this "combination" material, ranging in size from small miniature to a doorstopping 90 cm (three feet!) across.
In the InnSuites room of Great Basin Minerals (scottkleine@greatbasinminerals.com), Scott Kleine showed me an interesting little stash of copper specimens which he was marketing now for the first time, although they were found in 1960, during reclamation work at the old Rio Tinto mine, Mountain City district, Elko County, Nevada. About 50 sparkling thumbnails and toenails consist of branching groups of copper microcrystals, most of them nicely copper-colored but a few tinted a lush deep red by coatings of cuprite. A few of the groups rest on gray-white quartzite, or have shards of it in their innards.
We have heard before (see vol. 31, no. 3, p. 276) of good specimens of the very rare zeolite barrerite from its only significant worldwide locality--a beachside basalt exposure called the Rocky Pass claim, Kuiu Island, Alaska. At the Executive Inn show, Mary Toth of Alaska Garnet Mines (www.alaskagarnetmines.com) was presiding over a large tablefull of barrerite specimens (and many tables full of Wrangell almandine specimens too). Mary explained that she and her husband Istvan have been working the Rocky Pass claim intermittently since 1982, taking out good supplies of barrerite every time. Barrerite crystals look just like stilbite: bladed, wedge-terminated, pinched in their middles in many cases, and pearly white; they reach 5 cm, and most sit edgewise, singly or in bundles, on matrix of weathered gray basalt. The 100 or so matrix pieces offered this year by the Toths range from thumbnail size to 25 cm across.
Amethyst from Jackson's Crossroads, Wilkes County, Georgia was one of the major excitements at last year's Tucson Show, and since then the occurrence has been featured in the Mineralogical Record (see vol. 36, no. 6). At Tucson 2006, good supplies of this gorgeous amethyst could be found at the Smuggler's Inn with Rodney Moore of Dixie Euhedrals (www.dixieeuhedrals.net), and at the Clarion Inn and the Main Show with trusty Terry Ledford of Mountain Gems and Minerals (www.ledfordminerals.com). Terry, now working in partnership with Paul Geffner, hit a very large amethyst pocket in September 2005 and another, even larger pocket on New Year's Day, 2006; the latter, dubbed the "Celebration Pocket," yielded about 120 fine specimens. Shoppers at Tucson 2006 were offered brilliantly lustrous amethyst as sharp, fat, single crystals in lengths from 3 to 20 cm and as clusters to 20 X 20 X 25 cm; the crystals are zoned from milky white to colorless-transparent, to various intensities of gemmy purple. Nor can I neglect to mention that Terry Ledford had even more show-stopping spodumene (hiddenite) crystals newly unearthed at the Adams Farm, Hiddenite, North Carolina, including one large, beautifully terminated gem crystal that surpasses the well-known crystals owned by the Harvard Mineralogical Museum and the Cranbrook Institute.
At the Clarion, Dennis Beals of XTAL (dbxtal@aol.com) also had some fine new amethyst specimens--in fact, he had what seemed like thousands of them, from thumbnail to large-cabinet size, spread profligately all over the room. Being from the renowned Las Vigas, Veracruz, Mexico locality, these hardly represent "new" material, but any such large new specimen-hoard of such superb amethyst commands attention. If you need to see what I mean by "superb," check out the pictures (and don't skip the text!) in the Las Vigas article in vol. 34 no. 6 ("Mexico IV").
This was, as already mentioned, the Year of Canada at the Main Show, with plenty of great display cases on the theme, some of these of course including specimens from the Jeffrey mine, Asbestos, Quebec. In spring 2003 the last commercial operations ceased at the great asbestos mine, but local collectors (bless their intrepid hearts) have been busy ever since. In September 2005 a huge pocket was breached, presumably in the deposit's rodingite vein area, where nearly all the good grossulars, vesuvianites and diopsides have been found in the past. About 1000 first-class vesuvianite/diopside specimens were recovered, of which Jordi Fabre obtained an elite few, most of which he had sold before Tucson. Highly lustrous, color-zoned (pale green and purplish pink) manganoan vesuvianite crystals to 2.5 cm form flashing clusters, and bladed, transparent, pale green diopside crystals, also highly lustrous, to 2 cm rest delicately on these; some specimens show little gatherings of wing-like diopside blades in hollows in the pastel vesuvianite terrains. A few specimens with wafer-thin, gemmy,...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
