Rhodochrosite (uncommon locality)

Item Description

This is a hard to find specimen of Rhodochrosite from the Mountain Monarch Mine (sometimes called the Michael / Mickey Breen Mine) south of Ouray, Colorado. This small cabinet specimen hosts a sharp, well-formed, 9 mm rhombic crystal group of pink Rhodochrosite sitting in a vug of prismatic colorless Quartz with minor Pyrite on matrix. There is actually another smaller vug on the back of the piece is a few tiny Rhodos in it for a nice touch. The piece dates back to the 1960s-1970s era, and is a lovely example to add to any worldwide Rhodochrosite suite or a collection of Colorado minerals.
From the collection of Armon McPherson, a retired physicist, now living in New Mexico. Armon received his PhD from North Carolina State University in 1985, and worked at the laser laboratory at the University of Illinois at Circle Center. In the summer of 1997, Armon moved to the Argonne National Laboratory where he worked at the Advanced Photon Source, then the world’s largest synchrotron facility dedicated as an x-ray source. In 2001, he was asked to join a team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque to conduct laser research for DARPA. Finally, staying within Sandia, he transferred to the Z Facility, the world’s most powerful x-ray facility. He retired in the spring of 2017. Armon's introduction to mineral collecting came in the 1980s during graduate school when he attended his first mineral show. He took up the hobby of faceting gems, and focused his early collection on gem crystals, and later transitioned into collecting non-gem species. We are proud to offer specimens from his worldwide mineral collection here for you.