Quartz, USA, Colorado to Montana

Sorry been up in the forest, quartz every where. Most of it bull. It is hot enough to bake a rattle snake on a piece of schist in the valley. I am going to start taking the photos and will let you know here when they start. I have a month to get in the best then I'll be dowsing yellow metal. To much quartz here, I get agate and cherd and bull quartz. Need to buy a book . Side winding bushwhacking bull quartz ain't worth dowsing. Found some nice native silver but it ain't yellow.
One quartz chunk with yellow but I ain't bragging, I am baked and bored. The Dowser

OK dowser Ill look forward to the pictures.

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Rock:
Having reviewed this page, I see a couple of errors: first, Rob Lavinsky's Quartz with epidote at the bottom of the first page is listed as from "Silver Bow County.....Toll Mountain Lodes Occurence" is wrong: Toll Mountain is ENTIRELY in Jefferson County, and it is an AREA, NOT a "lode occurence". There are dozens of pegmatite occurences throughout the Toll Mountain area, not one singular site. This needs to be changed in your database, as I will show in my upcoming article on Butte area pegmatites. Rob Lavinsky has a tendency to display a lot of stuff not very well identified, as I have pointed out to him several times.

Second, the picture above his of "Quartz var. citrine (?)" is one of my specimens, but is in a colorless-tipped "phantom" from Silver Bow County, photographed by Jeff Scovil. His use of a colored background tinted the quartz yellowish. Its size is 6.0 x 2.3 x 2.0 cm. Try substituting this with the same crystal from my mindat page: [www.mindat.org]; this is a better true color image.

William C. (CHRIS) van Laer: "I'm using the chicken to measure it..."



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/02/2009 11:13PM by William C. van Laer.

Rock:
Here's another error you might want to check out: Under quartz from USA, Maine, Oxford County, Rotten Rock Pit, is a John Betts specimen of Bolivian copper....just click on the picture and see where it takes you to! Probably a simple URL mixup.
Chris

William C. (CHRIS) van Laer: "I'm using the chicken to measure it..."

William, Thanks for the corrections. I think I have them all sorted out now and the corrections made. The copper thing was particularly embarrassing. The photo number in the code string was off by 10 and that is what imported the wrong image. Still scratching my head wondering how I missed it. Must have been one of those late night/early morning sessions. Mindat needs someone like you to come in and go over the Montana localities and images and to make sure that they are as correct as possible. If response is slow, I like you have a day job and can spend only so much time as a mindat slave. Many of the Montana entries in the best minerals articles, the few that we have completed need some good descriptive text added to the articles under the images. So, when you get time.....

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Missouri Hill, Monarch District, Chaffee Co., Colorado, USA has exceptionally clear quartz crystals. I have personally seen them up to 3-4" in length, although this one, my favorite, is 1 1/2" long. I have had it wire wraped for some time, and don't want to undo it just for a photo, but here it is. I also could have sworn I read somewhere that the quartz from this location was very pure, and was used somewhat for crystals in oscillators, but I don't remember where I read it. A lot of the crystals from here have this sloping habit.

Bill, there appears to be a vertical blue line in the background of some of your images. Does it show up on your computer?

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

A contribution from Montana's famous PC mine.
Bill Dameron

No blue line in safari or firefox, if you meant baritebill.

Bill Dameron

Bill,
A worthwhile addition. Thanks. I have added it to the article.

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Rock,

May I suggest the following images be included to Quartz, USA, Colorado to Montana.

Roncari Quarry

Mindat Photo
Mindat Photo
Mindat Photo

Charles Creek

Mindat Photo

Wilkes Co

Mindat Photo

Thanks

AM, Yes, I agree, Ill ad them when I get back from Tucson in the middle of February.

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

I have a picture of the second largest smokey from the u.s.a. found by Rich Fretterd at his mine. it was around 4ft. tall I can try to send it, but I am not all that good at posting pictures here. E-mail me at chaotic2creations@live.com and I will e-mail you the picture.

"Here are some fine examples of what great Lake Superior agates look like. Where they come from no one knows. Ask the glaciers"
Rock Currier, 2009.

Actually Rock we do know where they come from; they are formed in the basalts of the Midcontinent Rift System as vesicle fillings from late stage silica-rich fluids that flowed through the basalts after they were deposited and cooled. The agate on the left (the tall one) was actually chisled out of a basalt flowtop off the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula.

Thanks also for using my photos in this article!! B)

Kristopher

To consider adding an image to best minerals we will need to have the image uploaded to the Mindat gallery. We don't insist on only great photos for the image to be added. All of the moderators here on best minerals can look at a ratty photo and know if it is a great or significant specimen or not, and we do sometimes add ratty photos to the articles because the specimen shown in the image is important. Its really not that hard to upload images. Some people have uploaded thousands of them. The first one takes some time, because you are learning your way around the entry screen. The second one goes faster and by the time you have uploaded a few dozen of them, its like falling off a log. If you would like to take a crack at it, click on this link for instructions on how to upload specimen images to Mindat.

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Rock,

The Boulder Batholith is very underrepresented here considering the quality and quantity of quartz specimens it produces. Some general comments about the area, although I am no expert: The Boulder Batholith is a Cretaceous Granitic intrusion with commonly occurring aplite pegmatite dikes. Pockets occur in graphic granite zones within the pegmatites and have produced beautiful specimens of smoky quartz and amethyst (commonly as amethyst-sceptered smoky quartz), also in very nice associations with feldspars and other minerals, including blue Clevelandite and Axinite-(Fe) Other minerals such as Schorl, Epidote, and rare Topaz are found in the pockets, but not usually (that I am aware) in combination specimens with the quartz. Below are some suggestions for sub-localities within the Boulder Batholith that should be included in the article. I am sure many others here on Mindat can add to the list.

---

Pohndorf Mine

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Little Gem Mine

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Goldflint Mountain

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Delmoe Lake Area

Hope these help a bit.

Best regards,
Jonathan



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/17/2012 01:38AM by Jonathan Woolley.

Jonathan,
It would certainly see you are correct in that the Boulder Batholith is indeed under represented. When I get time, Ill include many of your suggested images in the article along with your comments. I wish we had more good suggestions like yours. These images must have been uploaded since I did the first draft on the article because surly I would have included many of them if they were there. Would you like to take a crack at doing a best minerals article?

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Rock,

I think you are correct that most of these were uploaded more recently (I uploaded two of them last night, in fact). The bigger shame is that I know there are lots of good pieces from this area but not many good photos in the database even now. Of course, users like me share the blame for that.

I'll have a look at the Best Minerals article stubs and see if I can give one of them a shot.

Best regards,
Jonathan

Johathan,
There are a great many areas where the Mindat image bank is deficient and could be greatly improved. It is only through people like you that know more than most about particular localities that these deficiencies can be improved. Thanks for stepping forward.

You don't have to limit yourself to the "stubs" of partially already completed articles, though you would be welcome to work on any of those. You can choose from any mineral you want or any of the "stubs". Let me know what you would like to do. You will find it a great learning experience. If you would like to do a mineral that is not already stubbed out let me know and Ill create a stub for you to get started on. Just go to the bottom of the sub article and in the Message box start work. Don't click on any reply buttons. If you need help on how to get started, I can point to some text for you to read on how to get started. After you have done a couple of articles and have demonstrated that you can work with people who make suggestions as you go along, I can make you a moderateor on best minerals forum and you can create your own threads and edit any of the articles.

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Rock,

I was reading through the article and noticed that the last two sids-by-side pictures of the Deer Hill amethyst section are of the same specimen. I don't know if you meant to do this, but they should have the same dimensions (11.4 cm).

Philip