Siderite coating Calcite on Quartz (rare locality specimen)

Item Description

This is one of only a select few example of these unique piece from this fairly obscure locality that lies east of the famous Mineral Farm on the road up to the Camp Bird Mine above Ouray. This attractive and highly displayable cabinet sized piece features a few scalenohedral Calcite crystals with an interesting grey-brown hue, creating by a coating of tiny Siderite crystals, which are sitting on a fairly thick plate of milky white Quartz. If you look closely, you can see dozens of tiny "dogtooth"-shaped terminations that flow all the way up to the top of each respective crystal, and if you look at the base of the piece, you can see a pure white hue at the interior section of the Calcite, showing the different generations of deposition. The largest crystal measures 7.2 cm. Great condition all the way around, as the crystals are undamaged on the display side, though the piece is contacted on the base where it was separated from the pocket wall. This was a very limited find, with a unique crystallization, not only from the San Juan Mountains, but anywhere in Colorado. This specimen was collected by Larry Piekenbrock in the Fall of 1993.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 14.1.1.1 CO.1; 1949. GeGeorge (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