FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[Joan R.]

Among the specimens that recently I saw here, at Fabre Minerals, I would like to stick out a lovely alpine red Fluorite with smoky Quartz. For its aesthetic perfection and quality, I like to publish it in the forum.
This is a great Fluorite specimen formed on an albite matrix with smoky quartz in the lower part. Three perfect Fluorite octahedrons with well defined edges and faces (edges 15 to 20 mm), beside a very coloured group of octahedrons in the upper. Also, to enhance the aesthetics, a little fluorite octahedron is on the smoky quartz.
This specimen is from Pointe Kurz (3600 m altitude, Haute-Savoie, France) in the Mont Blanc Massif. The cristalliers who collect these specimens have a limited window for a few months in the summer and dangle off the edge of cliffs hundreds of meters above the ground. Many of them have died trying to collect these magnificent specimens.

Since ancient times the inhabitants of the alpine areas located around the Mont Blanc massif have known about the presence of beautiful "stones", which appeared into the rock cracks. Some crystals are similar to the ice water. Not surprisingly, the famous alpine quartz were formerly regarded as a form of solid water.
Generations of the well-known "cristalliers" have gathered at great risk. The french word "cristallier" has its origin on the Middle Age and designated the craftsman that cutted the quartz crystal, although the illustrated naturalist and geologist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799) said: -(Cristallier) is the name given to those who earn their living looking for quartz crystals. They are the french equivalents to "strahlers" in Germany and Switzerland.

In recent times, It has been displaying in the mineral shows other jewels contributing to give color to the alpine mineralogy. They are the octahedral fluorites whose colours vary from pink to red, on smoky quartz or albite matrix. Last summer, I enjoyed really incredible fluorites in the Museum of Mineralogy of Chamonix, visit strongly recommended.
https://www.chamonix.fr/animationculture/site_museecristaux/accueil.html

Thinking about I raise the following question: are these red-pink fluorites known from centuries ago or have been recent findings? Browsing the literature I found no citations on this item, but there is abundant about quartz. Some one could help?

[Brokenstone]

Good morning Joan, I mean this fluorites are recent findings, you read more information about this in Mineralogical Record, Mar/April 2007, an interesting article of Thomas P.Moore "Alpine Quarzt Gwindels". In this article he wrote:
"Supplies of Mont Blanc gwindels on the specimen market began to pick up in the mid-1980's: in 1983 the cristalliers/mountain guides Charlet and Ghilini (who would later open the great pink fluorite pocket) brought to the Munich Show a good selection of pink fluorite, "normal" smoky quartz and smoky quartz gwindels which they had dug on Mont Blanc (Wilson, 1984a), and the Denver Show of 1987 saw the marketing of about 200 recently found Mont Blanc specimens including about 50 showing gwindels in sizes to 15 cm (Wilson, 1988). In July 1994, a group from Munich led by Johann Nuffert discovered a 1.5 meter-wide cleft on the Col du Rochefort, a few hundred meters north of the French-Italian border, which yielded about 30 kg of smoky quartz crystals including 15 specimens with very sharp, medium-smoky gwindels, on matrix and loose, with individual gwindels to 10 × 10 cm-these specimens did not reach the international market (Nuffert, 2004). "
Un saludo
Pablo

[Pete Modreski]

Those are magnificent red fluorites, Joan.

Not a bad picture of the Mont Blanc massif, either!

Pete