Favorite Self-Collected Specimens

Bob,

Nice display!

Please get some photos of the cases at the show and post them for us. I would love to get back to the Midwest for a visit, but it won't happen this year. Another time, hopefully.

Regards,

Steve

Still doing the geode thing. For a while I collected mini geodes; I think that the criteria included that they had to be under 6 cm in maximum dimension. This one is one of the few that I have left. It is open on both ends for a rare view of a geode 'backside'.

Aragonite, quartz and goethite geode, (old) SR37 5.5 N. of Bloomington, Monroe County, Indiana. Circa 1965. 5x3.5x4 cm.


Front


Backside

Cheers!

Steve

This calcite with dolomite was extracted from an in-place geode by chiseling away the surrounding limestone. From SR37, Roadcut Locality 18, Harrodsburg, Monroe County, Indiana. 7x7x3.5 cm. Circa 1965.



Cheers!

Steve

Collected Thursday Feb 16, 2012. Cleaned and prepared Friday Feb 17 and photographed and put on this site today. This is a 13 cm x 11 cm Indiana geode from the Indiana state route 56 road cuts 7 miles East of the town of Salem in Washington county. The geode has abundant yellow thru orange to focally brick red dolomite, upon which numerous tiny marcasites and several complex intergrown modified rhombs of calcite occur. The largest calcite measures 6 cm x 3.5 cm. This is the better of the 2 halves of the geode. Whole hollow and collectible geodes from this site are very rare as the freeze/thaw cycles usually scales off the limestone along with geode portions and slices rather than half or whole geodes.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/18/2012 02:35PM by BOB HARMAN.

Nice calcite geode, Bob!

A straw-yellow tabular baryte crystal on a matrix of quartz and calcite rhombs coated with white aragonite and minor iron oxide. From the ‘aragonite locality’, Old SR37, 8.6 kilometers north of Bloomington, Monroe County, Indiana. Overall size: 4x3.5x2 cm. Baryte crystal: 1.5x1.5x1 cm. Circa 1965.



This specimen was exposed while breaking into a horizontal overhang at eye level. When first opened, the small geode contained only this single baryte crystal on the upper surface and it had a clear drop of fluid hanging from it. The rest of the geode was dry, as was the surrounding solid host rock, a silty limestone. Naturally, I had to taste the liquid and found it to be faintly briny but otherwise unexceptional. Maybe it was a remnant of Pleistocene glacial waters.

Cheers!

Steve

Native Sulfur, Steamboat Springs, Nevada. Measures 13 x 10 x 5 cm. This was self collected back in the late 1970's. I tossed the well soiled pants I was digging in into the washer when I go home from the dig and they came out later with butt and knees missing!

Good memories, Jay! We dug many flats of sulfur from Steamboat over the years and were not happy when the geothermal people closed it off. It is mostly on private land, unfortunately. We would trim it and then let specimens soak up a diluted, water soluble glue solution to stabilize the matrix. This helped prevent the acid fumes that would fog glass, turn wrapping paper crumbly brown and attack nearby unrelated specimens.

A pair of pants is a cheap price to pay for so much fun!

Cheers!

Steve

Stephen, Yes it was great fun while it lasted! I can remember the heat coming from one of the abandon geothermal wells near the dig site being hot enough to cook hot dogs (and hands)!

HEY GUYS Nothing even close to this collecting Indiana geodes! Clothes do get dirty but that is about it. The only thing that I can think of like you describe is getting an article of clothing accidentally bleached in a spot or two as part of putting dirty specimens in a bleach/soapy water cleaning mixture. Today it was 50ish and nice weather so I was out, but found nothing....... Good Hunting you guys !!!!!!! BOB

This Linarite was self collected by yours truly from the Grand Reef Mine dumps in Arizona about 1983. Back then you could get to the mine with little difficulty. Lots of signs with 'no trespassing' now. This linarite crystal is about 1 cm in length hiding in a nice quartz vug. I only saw the crystal when I broke a very large and heavy boulder with a rock press. The host rock is so hard that you can't really use a hammer to break it open. But there are some nice beauties in there.

Wow! Allen, just saw your post and had to edit this in. What a great crystal!

Hey Bob, maybe not with the geode collecting but if you ever collected the pyrite, marcasite and calcite at Pleasant Ridge, Indiana you would have an similar experience with clothing. It was the closest thing to collecting in an open-pit oil well. As I recall, the quarry breaches an Ordovician reef that is saturated with oil and tar. Lots of pockets and specimens but everything is coated and the matrix oozes oil for years. I always wore throw away clothes and took others to change into for the trip home. I used to buy gas from my uncle's farm tank to soak specimens in. About $0.25 per gallon in those days.

Here are a couple of calcites from the Cave Rock Quarry at Norristown, Shelby County, Indiana collected in February, 1966. So say my notes in my card index, but, strangely, I have no memory at all of the actual collecting trip, a one time event I suppose.

Calcite, golden gemmy crystal with etched, rhombohedral termination. 6x4x3 cm. Collected 2-12-1966.


Calcite, clear to faintly brownish rhombs with complex morphology. Large crystal is 4x3.5x2.5 cm. Overall size: 7x5x4 cm. Collected 2-12-1966.


Cheers!

Steve



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/19/2012 12:20AM by Stephen Rose.

Bob H. posted a nice Meshberger specimen the other day; here is one from another era in Indiana collecting. Bob mentions that this quarry has been closed for some time. In the olden days we could usually get permission to collect on weekends if we agreed to confine our activities to the blast piles and stay away from the walls. It was a hard thing, because we sometimes could see open pockets, some crawl-in size, near the base of the walls.



This main crystal on this specimen exhibits a combination of scalenohedral and rhombohedral forms resulting in a 'fin-like' look. It has minor secondary calcite overgrowth, and hydrocarbon is present as small rounded blebs on crystal faces. These are fairly common features of specimens from the Meshberger quarry. Overall size: 7.5x3.5x3 cm. Collected on August 1, 1966.

Cheers!

Steve

Quartz Crystal, New Melones Reservoir East Shore, Calaveras Co., California. Measures 19 x 10 x 9 cm.
Self collected in the early 1980's after a quick draw down on the new reservoir lead to a slope failure exposing a large pocket of huge quartz crystals.

Here are 2 unusual Indiana geodes, both self collected. The first pix shows a 13.0 cm x 8.0 cm geode with gray-blue chalcedony (microcrystalline quartz). Largely filling the cavity is a 6.0 cm x 4.5 cm complex grouping of hoppered orangish colored rhombohedral calcites. This is from Monroe County and was found about 2006. The second pix is of a geode collected at the Harrodsburg road cuts last Feb 2011. This 10 cm specimen contains a parallel group of barites; the largest crystal of which is 3.3 cm x 2.0 cm and double terminated. This largest crystal is yellow in its central area and pale bluish white near its tips. Most interestingly tho, is if you look closely near the top center of the barite crystal, you will note a couple of brassy millerite needles from the quartz piercing thru the barite blade into the geode cavity.
ENJOY and to all the others out there.......GREAT PIX of GREAT SPECIMENS!

HEY ALL This is almost totally off the thread, but cool nevertheless. Instead of a favorite self-collected mineral, it is a favorite self obtained Mineralogical Record. In August 1997, via regular US mail I received this copy of Vol 8 No 4, The Mines and Minerals of Peru. But look closely and if you turn the cover upside down you will see The Journal of Immunology! Both the front and back covers are like this, but the inside of the front and back covers are normal for the Min Rec as as are all the inside pages. Not a rare mineral, but a rare Min Record! A complete cover print of 2 journals, upside down to each other!! In 2008, I brought this to Tucson, and upon showing it to the Min Rec staff, I was rewarded with a free perfect copy of this issue. I also showed it around to others who thought it rather cool. In fact, Bryan Lees of Collector's Edge Minerals was especially interested as he had handled the specimen on the front cover.

I found this back in 1963 on top of a huge mound of stock piled franklinite at the sterling hill mine.

This 7cm Smoky/Amethyst scepter Quartz was found in 2011 from a remote area in the Harts Ranges of central Australia. It came out of a small pocket along with several other well-formed sceptered crystals.

© Patrick Gundersen

STEPHEN We (and a couple of others) have been posting a number of pix and descriptions of Midwest Indiana geodes thru out several threads these past few months. I would like to start a new thread of "Midwest Geodes" and collate all my photos and more onto this one thread on Mindat. As I envision it, it would include only Midwest sedimentary type geodes, both self-collected and bought. Not foreign or Dugway or any other type! I would hope other Mindat users with collectible geodes from Illinois, Missouri, Iowa and Ky might be tempted to post pix and descriptions of their finds as well as us. If you agree and are willing to start this new thread (you are probably more adept at this computer stuff than me), then please start the thread with a pix or two and I will continue and bring some of my previous pix onto the new thread. What say you?? BOB

From the same pocket as the previous crystal I posted, a 45mm x 28mm "reverse" style scepter Quartz.

© Patrick Gundersen

Bob, I think this are beautiful, to keep on Amethyst I gave one I like very much, Collected it in the Sintra quarry in St-Cyril-de-Wendover, Quebec. Not a killer but nice for the locality.