New Mexico Mineral Symposium — Abstracts

In writing a two-part article on our family for Lapidary Journal (April and May issues, 1990), Dorothy Stripp titled it "Mineral odyssey." I had never thought of my mineral collecting, which has always emphasized collecting in the field, in this way. I had been too busy with three boys in the family, a full time job, and occasional competition in triathlons and swimming, besides mineral and fossil collecting, but on looking back, it has been sort of an odyssey.

Having lived in New Jersey for many years, South Carolina for one year, Baltimore, Maryland, for three years, and Ohio from 1968 to date, I have had many opportunities for field collecting and meeting other collectors and have occasionally found myself involved in bonanza type finds. I was a geology major at Middlebury College in Vermont for about half a year, but never took a geology course. An extensive aptitude test led the college to strongly recommend a 3/2 yr plan with MIT for engineering. I chose not to do that because I wanted to be more involved in a liberal arts education, with some skiing and ice hockey, etc., instead of keeping my nose to the grindstone for five years for two equivalent degrees (BA/BS). I still kept a latent interest in geology, which had been kindled with family trips to the American Museum of Natural History gem hall in New York, along with such gifts as the book Getting Acquainted with Minerals and a fluorescent mineral set with UV light. A chemistry major at Middlebury led to graduate school at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and an interest in competitive swimming, which started in my last year at Middlebury and continued at the Ridgewood YMCA in New Jersey and Rutgers that led to daily workouts of more than 3 mi (sometimes more than 5 mi) of swimming. After quitting swimming in 1964,I became so fidgety that a swimmer friend's father, who was a rock collector in New Jersey, gave me a Herkimer "diamond" and suggested some places where I could expend some pent up energy; those places included Stirling Brook (for carnelian) in New Jersey and Middleville, New York for quartz.

A move to South Carolina the next year led to exposure to rutile, amethyst, and other localities in the southeastern states, including the Foote lithium mine in North Carolina. A move to Baltimore the next year led me to jump with both feet into mineral and Miocene and Eocene fossil collecting, including stints as president and bulletin editor for the Chesapeake club in Baltimore. My job was great but potentially hazardous, involving the nutritional details of life support for space travel (potential manned NASA trip to Mars) and extraterrestrial life detection. My first major find was of apophyllite on prehnite at Centreville, Virginia, in 1967. I had checked after the key blast, last one in the quarry next to a road, and seen nothing, but a later intuitive visit showed a rock doorway dropped out by removal of some of the blast material, exposing what would eventually be an approximately 60-ft tube of prehnite with associated minerals in a fault zone that had produced similar material in the upper layer of the quarry more than 10 yrs earlier. My camera jammed after only a few pictures were taken, and was sent away for repairs for much of the digging that ensued over a five-month period. After her interview with us for the Lapidary Journal story, Dorothy Stripp gave us a strand of thaumasite beads cut in Germany from Centreville thaumasite nodules and originally given to Hilde Seel of Philadelphia, the strand to accompany the prehnite in our collection. The Medici apartment in Baltimore ended up with well over half a ton of prehnite from this find, which was transported to Ohio the next year. A trip to the 1967 World's Fair in Montreal led me to request a room with a French-speaking family, which placed us at Frank Melanson's mother's house; this led to a long lasting relationship with Frank and eventually Wendy Hawthorneden (who was not married to Frank at the time). The largest Centreville specimen I collected ended up being traded to Frank for a Mont St. Hilaire siderite that he was collecting as curator at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. Frank, and eventually Mike Ridding (Silverhorn) who I met shortly afterward, and George Robinson, who was still a student at the time, are responsible for suggestions on Canadian collecting sites, which led to many interesting trips to the north country, including a couple involving my son Jay and me as safety men for Darryl MacFarlane (Grenville Minerals) during blasting excavations. Betafite, thorite, uraninite, sphene, edenite, spinel, and other minerals were the result.

Reflecting on our Baltimore times, I realize how involved I became with field collecting and other things. Due to collecting and club activities, I became acquainted with Paul Desautels, John White, and Peter Leavens at the Smithsonian, June Zeitner (through bulletin editing), Neal Yedlin, Lou Perloff and other micromounters (Baltimore Mineral Society), and Herb Duke (originator of "International Shows," an outgrowth of the 1967 National Gem and Mineral Show in Washington, D.C.). Another acquaintance, Joey Galt, a very enthusiastic collector from the Toronto area, asked me to accompany her on a trip into the Faraday uranium mine near Bancroft, Ontario. A bit of trivia: Her husband, Eric, was the person whose identity papers were stolen by Martin Luther King's assassin when he escaped to Canada.

Our move to Ohio in 1968 made for easier access to the fluorite, calcite, celestine, and pyrite localities and trilobites and other Devonian and Ordovician fossils of Ohio and Michigan and the Halls Gap millerite locality, although visits to New England (e.g., Eden Mills for garnets) and Canada continued sporadically also. Exceptional luck involved our family in both of the major finds of celestine at Portage, Ohio, (1985 and 2000-2002), and a number of fluorite finds at the Auglaize quarry at Junction, Ohio have been associated with a sixth sense that I can't completely explain. The quarry is more often barren than not, good finds separated often by years, and my visits have sometimes been many months apart but lucky much more often than would be expected.

In 1969-1971, visits to the tri-state area (Oklahoma-Kansas-Missouri) to hunt in the old lead-zinc mines with Chink Enders and other friends were quite memorable. In 1972 a short workout period leading to a national masters swim meet, and a warm-up for one of my races in the same lane with Buster Crabbe, gave me incentive to get into top shape for the championships the next year in Chicago, with the help of John Bruce, retired Oklahoma State University (OSU) coach, to see what I could do, with great success. That same year, on a hint from OSU, I found parts of a mastodon, including a skull (which I found with a probe) and a tusk approximately 10 ft long (in pieces however). The next year, we opened What on Earth, a natural items shop in Columbus, Ohio, and in 1977 tried a professional field trip to the Spruce Peak area in the North Cascades area of Washington. A pyrite and quartz pocket more than 22 ft long that our group found in the breccia pipe there rejuvenated that area as a collecting, site and it has been worked since then to date (Medici et al. 1978; Lapis International 1996). This digging experience was quite eventful, including the burning of a large propane tank and the cabins next to it and a helicopter crash and burning.

In 1978 after my aunt moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico, my sons and I occasionally visited her and collected smoky quartz at Sierra Blanca. Our first trip there was the most memorable. Within a half hour, Eric and I removed a little dirt near small roots of a tree and opened an obvious pocket of crystals (although nothing was visible at first because the whole mass of crystals had sunken into what turned out to be a refrigerator-sized pocket). That pocket produced a large amount of material, requiring the four of us to each make two trips down the mountain with specimens, and we left the whole area nearby covered with specimens for other collectors. This material had all been completely removed by other visitors to the site by the time of our next visit the following year. Regardless of finding crystals, this area near Ruidoso is one of the nicest backpacking areas we've visited!

In the mid 1980s my three sons and I did quite a bit of digging at the Herkimer "diamond" areas of New York (Wilson 2008). At one point, John White from the Smithsonian asked us to be on the lookout for a crystal pocket that could be exhibited in the museum. My son Eric found such a pocket while collecting with a friend, and our family dug it out in pieces and reassembled it for the museum (900+ pounds of rock), with the contents of more than 500 quartz crystals. It is now an island display in the new gem hall at the Smithsonian. During the same time period, I had been rooming with Art Grant, one of the country's top facetors, at mineral shows, and Art offered to teach Jay to facet. Jay took him up on this and has had quite good success in handling materials especially difficult to facet.

The pyrites of Ross County in Ohio have been quite interesting to dig, although obtaining access to the localities, all of which are on private land, is quite difficult of late. One locality in particular has produced both a 40-lb sea serpent-like piece now in the Cincinnati Natural History Museum, and a meter-long piece, now in the Smithsonian, (Stripp 1990; Lapis International 1996). We hope to include some of our specimens in the Mineral Oddities display at Tucson 2009.

I will mention one last site that we recently visited. Approximately 40 yrs after my first visit to Graves Mountain, Georgia, we went there to look for ruble. Although only small ruffles were found, some very nice stalactitic "turgite" (iridescent goethite/hematite) specimens were found, and a visit the next year (2005) yielded a spectacular iridescent pocket with a white mound in it, causing it to be named the Mt. Fuji pocket. This is a good example of typical field collecting in that one does not always find the desired material, but alternatives might prove to be just as exciting finds if one keeps open eyes and an open mind! As a last note, Dorothy Stripp's article in Lapidary Journal describes some of the ups and downs of field collecting, including some major hazards. My attitude is to not let the downsides be too worrisome; after each such occurrence, one starts with a clean slate statistically as long as rules of safety are always followed and kept in mind.

References:

1. Lapis International, 1996, Pyrit and markasit: extraLapis, no. 11, p. 20 and pp. 66-71 (in German).
2. Medici, J. C., Ludlum, N., Pfaff, N., and Hawes, W., 1978, Quartz and pyrite from Kings County, Washington: Mineralogical Record, v. 9, no. 6, pp. 349-358.
3. Stripp, D., 1990, Mineral odyssey: Lapidary Journal, April, pp. 51-64; May, pp. 30-48.
4. Wilson, W. E., 2008, American mineral treasures: Mineralogical Record, v. 39, pp. 64-71.