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Reno Chris, Please Help Identify Hot Rock


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Hi Condor:

 

Part of this shows just how difficult identifying minerals really is - even with a really great photo and how much more difficult it can be just from a verbal description. People perceive things differently, and describe things differently too. The galena photo that chickenminer posted is something I would never describe as "jet black" - to me that's gray. The problem is that you know what you have in your head, but I am probably imagining something totally different. Here is a picture of what I think of as jet black and porous.  This is a mineral that is found in the Red Cloud mine - but it looks lots different from the galena photo.

 

Here is a web page that describes the geology and some of the minerals found in the Red Cloud mine - a silver lead mine with lots of other stuff and quite famous for its wulfenite specimens.

http://www.mindat.org/loc-3348.html

 

I am interested in talking about it - lets see about getting a good photo - at least that would help a lot.

 

 

 

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You're both right.  Sooty black exterior on the weathered sections, bright shiny sliver on the broken pieces.  Now that I can see it in daylight, it's a lot clearer.  The photos won't do it justice, the shiny cleaved surfaces are tough to capture.  I took a picture of the pile of pieces that came from the center when I shattered it and the exterior.  It originally looked just like the Tombstone piece.

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Looks like you have lead-silver ore. Get back out there and dig up a truck load or two! Joking aside, good specimens would probably bring a few bucks from mineral collectors.

 

Not something really worth the hassle but I found a great article on how to extract silver from just such an ore at http://www.rocks4brains.com/SmeltingAg.pdf

 

Interesting stuff. I toyed around with smelting a little ore just to have my own little piece of silver from the wild, so to speak. But it is a lot easier to just fire my metal detector up and go dig a silver coin!

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I forgot, I found this little guy in the wash gravels about 10 ft from the galena specimens.  It's really a tough walk, I wouldn't want to carry out 50 lbs of this stuff, I'll have to get my son the packhorse to tag along and do the heavy lifting.

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Since it was found near the Red  Cloud mine it probably contains some silver.  I believe that was a silver mine. I detected a large piece of galena yesterday in the Plomosa district east of Quartzite,  theres a lot of it out there and it sounds off good on a VLF,   but I don't think it contains silver, mostly lead, It sure loads up a sluice box.

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