Tourmaline (multi-color doubly-terminated crystal)

Item Description

This is a beautiful, fine quality and classic Tourmaline crystal from this famous pegmatite locality in San Diego County. The Himalaya Mine is certainly in the higher tier of well-known Tourmaline localities, not only in California, or even the US, but arguably worldwide. Some of the most distinctive and beautiful Tourmaline crystals ever found have come from this mine. This piece is a fine, sharp, lustrous, doubly-terminated crystal featuring a strong pink hue in the center, and different hues of green on each end. One end has a strong almost emerald green hue which is fairly gemmy, while the other end is a bit more of an olive-green shade, and it's translucent, but shows some "cat's eye"-esque chatoyancy when rotated in the light. The piece is nearly a complete "floater", with no major damage, but one corner has an incomplete growth where the piece grew against the pocket wall or possibly another Tourmaline crystal, so it's not totally pristine, but not truly damaged in the traditional sense of the word. A lovely example of these famous old crystals from decades ago. The specimen weight is 26.13 grams.
This piece comes from the personal collection of Colorado mining legend, Dave Bergman. Dave is now retired from mining, but he worked for decades in various mines underground in Colorado, as a miner, mechanic, engineer, shift boss and foreman. His biggest claim to fame is that he was the foreman and the primary person in charge of mining and specimen recovery at the Sweet Home Mine in Colorado in the 1970s alongside his son-in-law, Rich Kosnar. This project what was the FIRST ever operation for specimen recovery at this historic locality. A full-page photograph of Dave can be seen mining underground at the Sweet Home in on page 58 of Peter Bancroft's book "Gem and Crystal Treasures". For reference, Dave is also the maternal grandfather of Brian Kosnar.