Pari, Kharmang District, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistani

Regional Level Types
Pari	Village
Kharmang District	District
Gilgit-Baltistan	Territory
Pakistan	Country

Several pockets in a pegmatitic formation where a number of nice crystals of orange color scheelite on quartz were found in summer 2007. The specimens were at first distributed in early 2008 by Dudley Blauwet (Mountain Minerals International), who has traveled many times in the area and published several great reports, and a few months later by Rob Lavinsky as well, but I have recently (as of 2019) seen other similar pieces that had been offered for sale by Dave Bunk, John Betts, Luís Burillo, Anton Watzl, GeoKrazy, Khyber Minerals, Herb Obodda, IC Minerals, Well Arranged Molecules, Gem Hunters, etc, unfortunately many of them with either an imprecise or a wrong locality. Specimens from this deposit have been in a number of prominent collections, such as Joan Massagué's, Bill & Carol Smith's, and others. However, the first pieces to be marketed were labeled ambiguously by some as coming from "Gharmung Area, Skardu District, Baltistan, Gilgit-Baltistan", a practice not uncommon with new localities, but thanks to the track that goes to Dudley Blauwet the exact locality was eventually determined with more precision near the village of Pari, which is actually in the Kharmang Valley, in the District of Kharmang, administratively split from the Ghanche District several years ago.

A photo of an unambiguous label pointing to the locality of Pari, produced by Blauwet's business, is available at https://www.mindat.org/photo-967234.html. You may also want to see the map above on this page.

Bill Smith, a collector expert on minerals of Pakistan that wrote some articles for The Mineralogical Record, very well connected with Dudley, owned two specimens of such scheelite labeled as coming from Pari (also spelled by some as Paari or Bari), near Khapalu, Ghanche District.

Pari is the locality registered for two specimens of this kind in the Bill & Carol Smith collection, totally (or partially) being dispersed by Dave Bunk, and also in the Online Mineral Museum by John Betts (please see external links below). Its geographical position has been found just in the Kharmang Valley by using Google Maps and Google Earth, and can be seen in the map at http://carlesmillan.cat/maps/Pakistan.png (close to the lower right corner).

The position of the village of Pari is 35° 1' 8" North, 76° 7' 47" East, or 35.019,76.130 (decimal).

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