Part of the joy of collecting is that you never know what you will find when you saw into the rock. The rock shown above is cut from a piece Carol collected years ago from the dump piles of the Old Hickory Mine in Utah. The Old Hickory mine was once mined for copper. The dump piles contain rock deemed not worth much-namely the offshoots of copper like azurite, cuprite, and chrysocolla to name a few.
The rock I cut into had streaks of chrysocolla along with calcite (the green above is the chrysocolla and the white is calcite. What I wasn't expecting was a copper based mineral called covellite. Covellite is the blue and it has pyrite in it so you get the blue/gold shimmer. Covellite is rare and increasingly sought after. The best source was the old Leonard mine in Butte, Montana-which has been closed down since the early '70's.
It took awhile to realise what we had here. This combination of minerals is atypical. This is a heavy sucka due to the metal content-it will make a wonderful pendant for Carol.
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