New Mexico Mineral Symposium — Abstracts

Last year, at the 36th Annual New Mexico Mineral Symposium, I regaled memories of the San Juan Mountains in the 1970s. This was a great decade of mineral specimen procurement with the Camp Bird, Idarado, and Sunnyside mines in full production and a number of smaller mines also operating. By the late 1970s almost all mining had come to an end in the San Juans and I asked myself what next! There was no way that I was going to stop mineral collecting so I told myself “Head to the Hills” (aka mountains).

In the 1970s I had collected easily accessible mine dumps but was wary of underground collecting by myself in long abandoned mines. I did try a few but they were small operations with limited underground workings. By this time I had quite a bit of underground experience in operating mines and knew what to expect in the subterranean but needed a collecting partner. This all changed in 1982 when a young man and his wife moved to Ouray, Colorado to open a gift shop in town called “The Sandman.” This is when I met Robert and Grace Stoufer whom Benjy Kuehling had introduced me to and who was also a mineral collector. He told me for a living he poured different colored sand in small bottles to create birds and animal sculptures. At first I couldn’t visualize what he meant but after he showed me his work I was amazed at the intricate designs he created and made a good living at it.

But this time I had built up a good reference library on the San Juan Region which included geology, mineralogy, and mining history publications (this was before personal computers and the internet). Robert Stoufer and I started to collect the mines in Ouray County both on the surface and underground if there was access to the workings. Robert adapted quickly to underground collecting and we made a great team. Research and careful collecting paid off and we started to recover many fine minerals specimens from large crystal groups to micro crystals. From the start I kept a detailed collecting log of our excursions that included a sketch of surface features of the mine site and a description of the minerals collected at the site. If we collected the underground workings a rough brunton compass survey and paced outline of the workings was drawn. This included a description of the vein and any crystal pockets that were discovered. The contents of the pocket were also notes as to minerals present and their size. This information along with surface and underground photos would prove invaluable for years to come especially when I started writing articles for the publication Rocks & Minerals. This was also a good permanent record, as in later years; many of the entrances to the workings were permanently sealed by the MLRD (Mined Land Reclamation Division of the Colorado Bureau of Mines) and EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) of the US Government to keep us safe.