New Mexico Mineral Symposium — Abstracts

Now that I have reached the age of 60 it seems like an appropriate time to look back at the last 30 yrs of mineral collecting in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado and all of the enjoyable and some not so enjoyable memories I have of securing mineral specimens for my collection.

My first mining-related job in the San Juans was in 1968 when I was employed as a mining engineer with the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company in Summitville, Colorado. Cleveland Cliffs was sinking a shaft on an enargite-pyrite vein called the Missionary orebody and was planning to mine the deposit by underground methods. At this time the Vietnam War was in full swing, and I was drafted into the U.S. Army for the next 2 yrs. When I was honorably discharged in the summer of 1970, the Summitville project had already gone belly up, but I was determined to return to the San Juans.

I landed a job with the Camp Bird mine at Ouray where they were just starting to mine a base metal replacement orebody in the Telluride Conglomerate. During the 1970s a number of mines were operating, and most of my time was spent in securing specimens from the operating mines and only occasionally field collecting. By the end of the 1970s most of the major mines had shut down, and my interest now turned to active field collecting during the short summer season from June through September. During the 1980s a number of important discoveries were made including anatase on quartz, large quartz crystals from a solution cavity in the Leadville Limestone, and a number of important finds in the Red Mountain mining district.

In the early 1990s the Mined Land Reclamation Division of the Colorado Bureau of Mines initiated a program of sealing all accessible shut down mines, and it then became a race against time to collect and preserve minerals that would never again see the light of day. The 1990s saw a number of mineral finds including rare secondary lead-copper-zinc minerals, colorful silver sulfosalt minerals, and more discoveries of anatase and additional discoveries of quartz in the Leadville Limestone.

During the past 2 yrs only a few notable mineral discoveries have been made in the San Juans. This is not to say that the mountains are worked out but only that the elusive pocket is still out there waiting to be discovered