Agnus Dei claim, Cameron Cone, Crystal Park, El Paso County, Colorado, USAi

Regional Level Types
Agnus Dei claim	Claim
Cameron Cone	Mountain
Crystal Park	Community
El Paso County	County
Colorado	State
USA	Country

The Agnus Dei claim, located by Rich Fretterd and Jean Cowman on December 8, 2012, may represent a part of a find first located by Ed Over, Jr., near Crystal Park, El Paso County, Colorado, in the 1950s. Over collected light brown, pinkish, or colorless singly or doubly terminated topaz crystals with striated prism faces and complex terminations, ranging from 1/8 inch to 2 inches long (Michalski, 1986). Crystals from the original find are extremely hard to come by.

Stories about the Ed Over find led Rich and his collecting partner, Jean Cowman, on a 3-year quest, starting with assembling references from the literature and then leading to 2 hikes around the steep terrain south of Manitou Springs, in western El Paso Co. Rich and Joan traversed the area, looking for indications of mineralization. Joan called attention to a quartz "blowout"--abundant milky quartz that sometimes suggests the presence of a pegmatite. Digging into the blowout first produced a large pocket, dubbed the "Halo pocket", containing large, nearly colorless but frosted, oddly asymmetrical quartz crystals weighing up to 50 pounds. Some are peppered with purple to white fluorite cubes from a few mm to 1 cm across. But, except for one quartz crystal with a broken topaz attached, there was no topaz.

Below the Halo pocket, Rich found more quartz--first a massive zone of large quartz phantoms where crystals were grown together, filling what had once been an open pocket. Below that was a zone in which the quartz was slabby or platy--not, Rich thought, a good sign. But, upon removing the quartz slabs, Rich found a well formed, sherry colored topaz crystal in a mass of altered rock that was now made up of a fine grained, whitish mixture of crumbly muscovite and feldspars. The crystal was a doubly terminated "floater". Well formed, etched prism faces gave way at both ends to multi-pointed terminations with a glassy luster--typical of later crystals found in the pocket.

Rich and Jean staked a claim, naming it Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), and designating the topaz pocket as the Tribute pocket, in honor of Ed Over, Jr., Arthur Montgomery, and Bill Hayward. Eventually, the pocket size expanded to 8 x 4 x 3 ft., and it aligned with the larger (12 x 3.5 x 2 ft.) Halo pocket.

The topaz crystals are mostly gemmy, but several kinds of inclusions are observed. Inclusions have not been studied in detail but include dark micaceous flakes, crystallites, and a hair-like, pale, fibrous mineral. Prism faces are covered with etch pits, and some crystals have irregular holes that may penetrate all of the way through the crystal. The terminations, however, are generally glassy, providing an attractive contrast to the more frosted prism faces. Those terminations are fantastic. On many crystals, they are notched, with "peaks" (dipyramids) on both sides of the notch.

Other Regions, Features and Areas containing this locality

References