New Mexico Mineral Symposium — Abstracts

I was sitting on a boulder finishing lunch, reading the ingredients of a can of potted meat (Parts? What kind of parts? Some things are best left unknown.) I was thinking that it was a long way into the collecting location for nothing, when I heard my friend, John, yell he'd found a pocket. This was in the early 1980s and we had been going through the book, Fluorspar Resources of New Mexico, Bulletin 21, looking for possible places to collect. We came to this place, among others, known as the Last Chance and Watson Mountain prospects. Except in winter, this is a great place to camp, and it provided many years of good collecting.

The area is located on the west side of the Mogollon Mountains, and the rocks consist of finely porphyritic and agglomeratic andesite. The area is highly faulted with one fault parallel to the Gila River. Much of the ground is brecciated. It is in this brecciated volcanic rock that most of the specimens were collected.

The fluorite is crystallized in the octahedral form with dodecahedral and cub-dodecahedral overgrowths. Some crystals exhibit cube overgrowths. Crystals up to two inches were found. Colors of the fluorite include: green, purple, zoned green-purple, white, and some pink. Some, but not all of the octahedral fluorite is covered with a thin, ugly layer of drusy quartz. This can be stripped off with hydrofluoric acid. We developed a technique to cover the matrix with raw bee's wax, stripping the quartz, then removing the wax. The luster on the octahedrons is very bright. The color seems to be stable. Some of the crystals are sensitive to ultrasonic cleaning.

After I cleared up my lunch mess, (tossed the empty potted meat can), I went over to see what John was collecting, not bad stuff. I then found a pocket of my own.