By Wendell E. Wilson

      I spent two years, from late 1969 to late 1971, in Arizona working on my Master's Degree in mineralogy at Arizona State University. Naturally almost every free minute was spent crawling into bat-ridden and rat-infested black holes from one end of the state to the other, getting to know what we all revere as the Famous Localities. By my second year I was something of a veteran. One afternoon a couple of newly arrived graduate students approached me out by the swimming pool at the graduate dormitory. As I recall, they weren't even geology students or mineral collectors. They said they were looking for some adventure and thought it would be great to visit an old mine and muck around underground for a while . . . what locations could I suggest? I listed a couple of easy and safe choices appropriate to beginners, but recommended against the famous 79 mine because of its extensive, complicated, and in some places dangerous workings. Of course this was where they wanted to go, and they would not be dissuaded. So I reluctantly gave them directions for getting to the mine and negotiating the underground passageways to the best collecting spots, then turned back to sunning myself. They set off happily, with their shiny, unscratched Estwing hammers in hand.

The next afternoon they found me in the same place. Both were looking quite filthy and somewhat worse for the wear, but they were sporting big smiles and carrying several dusty beer flats which they set down in front of me. When the lids came off I saw a stunning array of exquisite, turquoise-blue aurichalcite specimens, thumbnails to cabinet sizes, seven full flats of them! No one, to my knowledge, had ever found anything nearly this good at the 79 mine, much less seven flats of it! While I sat there with my mouth open they cheerfully described breaking into a pocket in the ceiling of what was known as the "aurichalcite room." Then they said the magic words: "We didn't finish the pocket... half of it is still there if you'd like to go get some yourself."

Well, a senior graduate student must maintain his dignity. I nodded sagely, congratulated them, asked them absently if they planned to sell the lot (they hadn't decided, but later sold it at a swap meet), and mused that perhaps I might amble out to the mine sometime when I had nothing better to do.

As soon as they had disappeared into the dorm to wash up I suddenly decided that I had nothing better to do. For a moment I considered going out to the mine alone, and hogging what remained of the pocket. But my next thoughts were of being found three weeks later pinned under a rock on the Fourth Level, dead of thirst. So with great reluctance and generosity to match their own, I called a collecting buddy of mine, Doug Miller, and in short order we covered the 100 miles out to the mine.

I agreed to split the take with him, but I wanted to do the actual extraction by myself, so he went off to the "wulfenite room" elsewhere on the Fourth Level, with a friend of ours who had tagged along but was not in on the split, and I retired to the "aurichalcite room" to see if the fellows had been pulling my leg. They had not.

The "aurichalcite room" was no larger than an average kitchen; the floor was mounded high with rubble and sloped upward to within a few feet of the ceiling. At the back one could sit on the muck pile and work in the ceiling. At first I didn't see anything, but I took my hardhat off as they had instructed and forced my head up into a very tight and irregular fissure, and from there I could just see a dark, horizontal opening perhaps 5 or 6 cm high and 20 or 25 cm wide. I couldn't really see into it, but I could reach it, and inside I felt loose pieces, so I carefully slid one out onto my other hand. That specimen, the first one I removed, proved to be the world’s finest specimen of aurichalcite ever found.

Aurichalcite is universally thought of as being finely acicular, pale blue, and extremely delicate. This specimen, however, has no matrix... it is a hard, solid crust of aurichalcite about 1 to 1.5 cm thick and 14 cm (5.5 inches) long. The individual crystals are so large that they are very dark turquoise-blue-green instead of pale blue, and they actually have individual termination faces which sparkle as the specimen is turned. In the course of a couple of hours I removed three flats of aurichalcite from the pocket, but only a few specimens had the dark blue-green color and sparkling terminations, and the first was the biggest and best.

We climbed back out of the mine and paused long enough to take a picture of ourselves; I was black with the manganese oxides of the aurichalcite room, but Doug was neat and clean from working in the wulfenite room. Then we headed back down the bumpy mine road and onto the highway to Phoenix. The hundred miles home were long ones as I balanced the best flat on my lap, cushioning it from road bumps, petrified that a sudden pothole would cause the big piece to flip upside down and destroy itself. Because of the delicacy of the aurichalcites, I had packed all of the specimens open-face and could not relax.

Once back at poolside I spent some hours just staring at the big piece and wondering what to do with it. It was intimidatingly gorgeous, clearly out of my league relative to the rest of my collection, and frighteningly fragile —at least I imagined it to be so, although it is in fact surprisingly sturdy. In the end I sold it because I couldn't stand the pressure of worrying about breaking it someday. I kept a smaller piece and sold the big one to Scottsdale collector Tom McKee—for the excrutiatingly low sum of $150, but what did I, a mere student, know about the dollar value of world-class specimens? The rest of my half of the split I sold to a local dealer, and Doug sold his too.

Tom was faithful to his trust, preserving the great specimen as perfect as the day I collected it. Following his tragic death in 1987, it passed to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, and has been on public display there since that time. Another fine one later ended up in the collection of Roz and Norm Pellman, but was sold following Norm’s death in 2004. Where the rest of the specimens have all gone I don't know. But in all the time since, during which my knowledge of minerals has broadened considerably, I have never seen another aurichalcite from any locality worldwide that is as good as even the twentieth best from that pocket. I don't remember much about the best pieces found by the first two collectors, but some of them were of comparable quality, and two were of the best very dark blue-green color. One of the fellows, Dr. Kent Knock, now of Trumbull, Connecticut, still owns the better of the two and it is nearly as large and fine as the one Tom McKee bought from me.

The discovery became quite famous among Arizona collectors, and in the following years the little aurichalcite room at the 79 mine was reamed out to the size of a two-story house. Unfortunately, no specimens even remotely similar to those from the "great pocket" were ever found. Because I found the best piece and it ended up in a prominent Arizona collection, I think I am sometimes given more credit for the discovery than I deserve; but it was Dr. Knock who, following my directions, discovered the pocket and so kindly shared it with me.

Figure 1. The world’s finest specimen of aurichalcite, 5.5 inches, from the 79 mine, Banner district, Gila County, Arizona. Arizona-Sonora
Desert Museum collection;
photo by Jeff Kurtzeman.

Figure 2. One of three flats of aurichalcite collected that day; the big one is at upper left. Photo by Wendell Wilson.

Figure 3. The author (foreground) with collecting partner Doug Miller (right) and a non-collector friend at the 79 mine in 1971, having just emerged from collecting the aurichalcite pocket.