Selling old turquoise originally purchased in the 70's. Very nice quality.
Cripple Creek Turquoise Mine
Cripple Creak Turquoise comes from the Cripple Creek mining area,
located in Teller County Colorado, near the town of Cripple Creek. This
is a very hard stone with color 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. This turquoise, like Carico Lake turquoise, is found
as a by product of gold mining. This stone is found as both vein
material and nodules.
This history of Cripple Creek Turquoise is quite
interesting. One of the last great Colorado bonanza camps, the district
was first discovered in 1891 by cowboy Bob Womack and turned out to be
one of the richest gold mining camps in US history. The 500 mines in the
area have yielded over 600 metric tons of gold, making it the third
most productive gold district in the history of the United States.
Cripple Creek is unusual in that it is one of only a
few domestic Turquoise mines still active today, although production
has been limited. There are currently two active turquoise mines in the
area being operated by two different families. The area is also quite
mineral rich; along with gold and turquoise, over 120 other mineral
species have been found.