Zircon (fine locality specimen)

Item Description

Helen Hunt Falls is a famous locality and landmark located up Cheyenne Creek, west of Colorado Springs. The locality was named in honor of the writer, poet and activist, Helen Maria Hunt Jackson, who is buried in Colorado Springs. It is arguably the most well-known locality for Zircon crystals in Colorado (along with St. Peters Dome), and specimens have been found since the 1800s. In fact, Dana's Mineralogy from 1898 actually has a crystal drawing of a specimen listed as coming from "Cheyenne Mountain", which is not far from Helen Hunt Falls, and was probably from there to be begin with. Here we have an excellent and showy example of these iconic Zircons featuring many fine quality, sharp, notably well-formed rich reddish-brown colored pyramidal crystals of Zircon measuring up to about 2.2 cm, on Quartz matrix with pinkish-brown iron staining. The main Zircon crystal is completely pristine and sits beautiful atop the specimen. It's undoubtedly one of the best Zircons that we've seen from the locality with respect to size, quality, composition and quality. It's important to note that a lot of the crystals from this area can be somewhat "dingy", crude and dull, but the crystal on this piece are quite smooth, lustrous and untarnished.
Valued $3,500
Ex George Loud Collection No. 394 CO.1; 1297. 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