New Mexico Mineral Symposium — Abstracts

Squawcreekite, from the Squaw Creek tin mine, in Catron County, New Mexico, has been discredited. In 1897 a new mineral from Brazil, tripuhyite, was described by today's standards inadequately. The mineralogy of tripuhyite was revisited, and during that process the mineral squawcreekite was determined to be stannian tripuhyite.

Some mines in Colorado's San Juan Mountains have produced sparse colorful sulfate minerals. Eckhard Stuart and I found linarite in waste rock from a mine (name undetermined) south of the Aspen mine, between Blair Gulch and Arrastra Creek, east of Silverton, Colorado. It occurs with anglesite, cerussite, chalcopyrite, covellite, cuprite, jarosite, galena, malachite, and quartz. Local collectors go there to collect coarse lumps of green fluorite.

The Mogul mine, at the head of Cement Creek and north of Silverton, had a sphalerite-rich boulder with crusts of tiny blue ktenasite crystals.

Near the entrance of the closed-up Mountain Springs mine at Rico a boulder was found containing various blue and green crusts, which were tentatively identified as langite, posnjakite, and wroewolfeite. Unfortunately I was never informed about which crust was which, so the crusts remain unlabeled. The boulder also had some tiny crystals of linarite. Pyrite, commonly occurring as octahedrons, is found in boulders on the mine's extensive dumps.

There has been some confusion regarding the species "calciovolborthite." The name has now been discredited, and most of this material is now called tangeite. Some was collected at the Tippecanoe mine in La Plata Canyon, Colorado. It was poor material, found in boulders from a shallow trench outside the mine. At a dump to the northeast, excellent micro crystals of azurite were found.

Eckhard Stuart and I searched for the Arrowhead claim in the Slick Rock district of Colorado. It is the type locality for rossite and metarossite, which were described by Foshag and Hess in 1927. The minerals were reported as being on the left side of the claim entrance. We found coarse rossite and metarossite on the right side of one adit and assumed that the type locality was somewhere nearby. On a return trip I was taking a picture of Eckhard standing in the adit entrance when I noticed that an arrowhead was carved into the sandstone above his head. In 1927 Foshag and Hess got their lefts and rights mixed up. Also occurring there are metatyuyamunite, pascoite, brochantite, volborthite, gypsum, and metahewettite.

In 1988 a trip was made with Arnold Hampson to the Temple Mountain district in Utah. A silicified log was found in the North Mesa 5 mine that had some pyrite, montroseite, and sparse sphalerite replacement, which was oxidized to form sulfur and numerous sulfate minerals. Identified were ferricopiapite, rozenite, kornelite, szomolnokite, a halotrichite-group mineral, minasragrite (monoclinic), and its new polymorphs: orthominasragrite (orthorhombic) and anorthominasragrite (triclinic). A three-watered monoclinic vanadium sulfate named bobjonesite was also found.

Adjacent and interconnected to the North Mesa mine group is the Lopez incline. It had some bright pink crusts of cobaltomenite and some tiny spots of a blue mineral (clinochalcomenite?). There were also tiny scaly olive-green crystals of alunogen and olive-green acicular crystals of a halotrichite-group mineral.

At the 2002 Denver show Dmitriy Belakovskiy asked me if I could collect specimens of a new mineral for him. He needed to determine the water content of a mineral he was working on, but he was running low on material. So the following month I went out to Searle Canyon, in Utah's Thomas Range. I collected a few flats of material, along with bixbyite, topaz, and sparse red beryl. I also filled three small bags with pit fines. I panned out a bag of pit fines, about 250 crystals, which did not cover the bottom of a micromount box. It was enough for the water content test.

The panned crystals and a bag of pit fines were mailed to Dmitriy. He did his testing and submitted the research to the International Mineralogy Association (IMA). It was approved, named
holfertite, and has the number IMA2003 -009. This mineral is a calcium uranium titanium silicate.

Several years ago a similar potential new mineral from Topaz Valley was partially described, but with titanium being dominant over uranium. If the Topaz Valley material's description is correct then it probably forms a series with holfertite.