Opal (rare locality specimen) (collected: 1958)

Item Description

An obscure locality specimen, self-collected by George Loud in 1958 inside Rocky Mountain National Park. Please note that collecting specimens inside any national park is strictly forbidden today, which makes this such a desirable locality piece, because you simply cannot get them anymore. This attractive cabinet sized specimen hosts gentle blue-grey colored Opal mixed in with surrounding volcanic host rock matrix. The piece glowsh with an intense green color under SW UV light. Specimen Mountain (historically also referred to as Geode Mountain and Mountain Smokes) is a large extinct volcano at an elevation of 12,494 feet, and according to the entry on mindat.org was active 27 million years ago. Specimens from this locality are simply impossible to find on the market, so if you collect rare locality specimens or you're an Opal aficionado, this is something you're not likely to find anywhere else.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 212 CO.4; 1446. 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