New Mexico Mineral Symposium — Abstracts

Mining in the San Juan Mountains is history, with all major mines shut down and little hope of any new operations starting up. Reclamation of mining sites is in progress along with an active program of permanently closing the mine openings.

Usually, mine-land reclamation projects destroy or severely hamper collecting at mine sites, but the reverse is true at the National Belle mine. Removal of the dump for stream diversion exposed low-grade ore mined in the 1880s that produced many fine specimens of barite, covellite, enargite, pyrite, tennantite, and sulfur.

Underground collecting at the Pilot mine before the adits were sealed produced fine specimens of scepter quartz, kutnohorite with calcite, and pyrite epitactically oriented on marcasite.

Anatase, brookite, and rutile continue to be found at new localities throughout the San Juan Mountains. Probably the best locality is the Silver Mountain and Indiana mines, which are located on the same vein. The anatase occurs as beautiful blue-black microcrystals on clear quartz crystals. Brookite occurs as honey-yellow to medium-brown tabular crystals that range to 0.5 mm long. Rutile occurs as lathlike pale-brown crystals to 0.1 mm that are crystallized on either brookite or quartz.

The Oyama mine, near the top of Stony Pass, has produced beautiful groups of iridescent amber to dark-brown siderite that occurs as single crystals and as groups of stacked parallel-growth crystals. This locality has also produced scepter amethyst crystals to 2 cm long.

The Grizzly Bear mine, in addition to beautiful rhodochrosite crystal groups, has produced rare crystallized minerals including brookite, anatase, and bismuthinite.

Continued collecting at accessible mine dumps and remote localities should produce new finds in future years. Because mining seems to be an industry