Quartz ''casts'' after Anhydrite (ex Gary Weaver Collection)

Item Description

A really cool and unusual specimen from the classic San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado. This piece features beautiful, well-formed "casts" (some people call these epimorphs or perimorphs) of lustrous, sparkling white Quartz crystals after tabular and boxy/square crystals of preexisting Anhydrite. Essentially, the Anhydrite was coated by Quartz, and a solution came in later and dissolved the Anhydrite away. Anhydrite literally gets it name from "without water", so when it's introduced to a liquid solution, it dissolved away easily. If you're a Quartz collector, maybe you don't have one of these in your collection from Ouray, and there are not nearly as many of them out there as there used to be. The piece was collected by Robert Stoufer. From the collection of Gary Weaver of Prescott, Arizona (1944-2019). Gary was an electrical engineer who worked for many years for Hughes Aircraft in California. After retiring to Prescott, Arizona in the early 2000s, Gary rekindled his childhood love of minerals, amassing a collection of roughly 2000 specimens focusing on localities in which he and his wife had lived or visited (Mexico, Peru and the western / southwestern United States). You can read Gary's obituary here https://www.dcourier.com/news/2019/apr/27/obituary-gary-richard-weaver/