Graves Mountain in Lincoln County, Georgia, is certainly one of America's most prolific mineral localities, known around the world for its unsurpassed rutile specimens, an abundance of fine
lazulite, and a host of other minerals.
The tests, which started in December 2006, used a range of Thomson's solutions for mobile delivery, including the SmartVision service platform and Grass Valley Opal IP encapsulators, Argos Mobile encoders and
Lazulite management systems.
Bill often collected far afield--traveling to Mexico for wulfenite at Los Lamentos and boleite at Santa Rosalia; to Spain for the famous pyrites; to Prince of Wales Island, Alaska for epidote; to the Yukon Territory for
lazulite; to almost all the localities in California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah.
During this past August's collecting season the phosphatic ironstones exposed in streambeds at Rapid Creek-Big Fish yielded about 3 flats of superb and beautiful
lazulite thumbnails and miniatures, with indigo-blue, mirror-faced, form-rich, flashing
lazulite crystals to more than 2 cm.
Donald Doell); Minerals of Ontario (George Thompson); Minerals of Ontario (Wendy and Frank Melanson--with an extremely detailed geologic map of the Bancroft-Wilberforce area, spotting 60 collecting localities, spread along the back of the case; you could also pick up one of these maps at the Melansons' booth); Collecting Phosphates in the Yukon (Bill and Elizabeth Moller); Yukon Phosphate Rarities (United Keno Hills Mines Limited--two amazing big
lazulite specimens there); Canadian Silver (Sterling Hill, New Jersey Mining Museum); and Thunder Bay Amethyst (Sandra and Michael Grieve--proudly explicating their "Purple Haze amethyst mine" and showing off its terrific specimens).
At the Main Show, the Tyson's Minerals stand showed off sparkling, mostly thumbnail and miniature specimens of, among others, lustrous shaving-brush aggregates of acicular, deep blue gormanite crystals on beds of sharp, gemmy brown, rhombohedral siderite crystals; very lustrous, high-quality, sharp, blue-black
lazulite crystals to 1.5 cm on siderite druses with quartz; white hexagonal-tabular crystals of whitlockite to 2 cm; lustrous pseudo-octahedral wardite crystals to 1.5 cm, in varying hues of colorless, green, yellow and brown: translucent white apatite prisms to 5 mm in little groups; and the rare arrojadite as lustrous brown, platy crystals to 3 mm densely covering matrix.