Galena with Pyrite (fine locality specimen)

Item Description

Creede is one of the great silver districts in Colorado, but might be best known for its sulfide minerals to collectors. Here we have a fantastic near large cabinet sized display specimen of Galena from the prestigious Commodore Mine featuring many excellent, sharp, well-formed, lustrous, silvery-grey metallic cubic crystals (some show octahedral modifications on the corners) measuring up to 3.6 cm on edge, associated with oxidized pyritohedral crystals of Pyrite measuring to about 4 mm. When the piece is backlit, you can see a tiny bit of gemmy greenish Sphalerite around the edges of matrix for a nice touch. Most of the Galena crystals are in good shape, though not all of them are totally complete. With that said, it's still a striking and impressive example, the likes of which one rarely encounters from the Commodore Mine because near large cabinet sized examples are rare, and the crystals on this piece are big as well for the locality. Additionally, many Galena specimens from this locality can be quite dull, with a pale matte appearance on the surface, but there are many faces on these crystals with a bright mirror-like luster. Certainly one of the most impressive Galena specimens we've ever had to offer from Creede. The piece was collected by Bob Fulton, a former miner at the Commodore Mine, who later worked as a guide at the Creede Underground Mining Museum.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 2611 CO.9; 7084. George (born August 16, 1942) is a well-known mineral collector from Washington, DC and South Carolina respectively, and was a patent lawyer by trade for over 50 years. He assembled one of the great mineral collections in the U.S., comprising worldwide specimens, and in later years he sold the worldwide specimens to focus on minerals of the United States, specifically locality suites with an emphasis on amazing representation of species while still maintaining fine quality. The specimens remarkably range from micros to all the way up to large cabinets in size. We recently acquired most of his impressive 9000+ piece collection, and the VAST majority of these pieces will be offered here in the auctions, as we feel that everyone deserves and equal opportunity at acquiring these important, well-documented and fine quality specimens for their collections.
See: https://mineralogicalrecord.com/biographies_labels/george-loud for more information