Where to find turquoise in colorado

The TradeRoots Collection. This is a very hard stone with colour range from light and dark blues with brown matrix, and more rarely a golden limonite matrix to blue-green. Hardness can be up to 6 mohs. The best use over all is for inlay and cabbing, although the medium quality is often a little pithy or porous, the result of which does not become visible until the end of the polishing process.

Cripple Creek was born in an gold strike; just eight years later it had grown into a booming city of 20, residents with mines turning out one million troy ounces of gold per year.

The first miners at what is now Cripple Creek, however, were not gold miners, but Native Americans who collected turquoise from exposed veins. Their points and scrapers of flaked chalcedony are found today along with bits of turquoise on the surface of the North Star Mine.

Turquoise has long held a special place in the beliefs of Native Americans, especially those cultures indigenous to the turquoise-rich Southwest. While Native Americans admired turquoise for its beauty, they also venerated it for its spiritual, religious, and ritualistic significance.

Some cultures considered turquoise a part of the sky that had fallen to Earth; its blue-green colors symbolized the connection of Earth with sky, and body with spirit.

In Navajo and Hopi creation legends, turquoise represents sky, water, bountiful harvests, health, and protection. It is also an element in Zuni rituals and Navajo rain ceremonies. Apaches linked turquoise to rain at the end of rainbow and attached bits of the stone to their bows in the belief that it guided their arrows. Turquoise mined in the Southwest has been recovered from indigenous cultural sites as distant as Florida, Canada, Central America, and the Caribbean.

The Southwest has more than significant turquoise sources, most related to shallow, oxidized copper deposits in New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. Top-quality turquoise, however, is rare.

Fewer than a dozen sources consistently yielded turquoise in which color, durability, and hardness did not require artificial enhancement. Most of these sources have been mined out and others lost to open-pit copper mining. Colorado turquoise occurs in a variety of mineralogical environments. At the Turquoise Chief, it is present as veinlets in granite; at the Last Chance, it is found in heavily oxidized sections of the silver-rich Amethyst Vein.

Villa Grove turquoise occurs as veinlets in altered gabbro. At Manassa, Native Americans originally mined turquoise from underground workings in solid basalt, and the site was later mined commercially. At Cripple Creek, turquoise veins are found in altered diorite. The Cripple Creek deposit is located within the Central Colorado volcanic field, an extensive area of volcanism that dates the early Oligocene Epoch some 34 million years ago.

All local mineralization is related to the Cripple Creek caldera, a collapsed volcanic system created when eruptions alleviated magmatic pressure, causing a volcanic dome to subside and fracture. Mineral-rich, hydrothermal solutions associated with repetitive surges of magma then emplaced metallic gold and the gold-telluride minerals calaverite and sylvanite.

The Cripple Creek caldera is a circular mass of brecciated rock five miles in diameter. Gold and gold-telluride minerals occur within its core in rich veins and pockets. Surrounding this core is a much larger area of disseminated, low-grade gold mineralization.

This north-south-oriented fault controlled the emplacement of all Cripple Creek turquoise. Interestingly, bits of native gold are occasionally seen within the turquoise itself. When gold was discovered at Cripple Creek in , an abundance of turquoise lay scattered about the surface. But most miners were concerned only with gold; only a few collected turquoise, usually as a novelty item to trade for drinks in the local saloons.

Musician and part-time gold prospector Wallace C. Burtis was first to take a serious interest in Cripple Creek turquoise. In , he bought a claim, not for its poor showing of gold, but for the turquoise that lay on the surface. Burtis renamed the claim the Florence Lode, taught himself gem cutting, silversmithing, and jewelry making, and began mining, working, and selling turquoise.

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