Quartz var: Amethyst (beautiful morphology)

Item Description

The Little Giant Basin in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado is best known for its fine quality Quartz crystals, which are quite varied in their form, habits, color and styles. We've seen crystal habits that range from single prisms to scepters and "reverse" scepters to skeletal / "fenster"-style crystals which range from white/colorless to purple/lilac and even sometimes smoky colored. This piece is a unique and enchanting big prismatic crystal of light lavender colored Amethyst with sharp, lustrous "stepped" prism faces (similar to "alligator Quartz"), but when you look at the termination, you can see hollow / skeletal faces, creating a very three-dimensional "open" appearance that we're not used to seeing the species. Additionally, if you turn the piece around, you'll see there is a single smooth prism face with a light drusy overgrowth of white Quartz. It almost looks as though there was a partial scepter style growth taking place, where the Amethyst overgrew a previous single prism of white Quartz. Additional smaller sparkling groups of Quartz can be seen on various spots as well for a nice touch. This one is certainly a one-of-a-kind, as I'm sure there isn't another exactly like it from the Little Giant Basin. A great piece for any fan of worldwide Quartz specimens, it's not just a specialized Colorado locality piece. For reference, George's label states that the Little Giant Basin was the site of the first profitable mine in the San Juans.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 210 CO.36; 9970. 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