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Summer / Fall 2000 Volume 4, Number 2
The Jades
The name Jade includes both nephrite and jadeite. How do they differ? This introductory article examines the general history and basic mineralogy of jade.
Known to the Chinese as the Stone of Heaven, nephrite jade has been carved for tools and beautiful intricate works of art since Neolithic times. It is the toughest gemstone and the most difficult to polish.
In 1938, nephrite was discovered on Wheaton Creek in the Cassiar district of British Columbia. Since then, a number of nephrite deposits from Hope to the Yukon border have been found and mined by several interesting Canadian prospectors.
Botryoidal jade is a relative newcomer to mineral collectors. Since its discovery in the 1950s, only a few notable localities were ever found and documented. The latest to make its debut is Northern Lights Jade from Canada's Yukon Territory.
Canada has produced some of the world's finest jade carvers. Some of the well-known pioneer carvers of jade came from British Columbia and were all very strong carvers in the 1980s.
Parker Mine, near Notre-Dame du Laus, Québec By Daniel Comtois
This article is about the classic location for spinel in Québec. Now closed, this mica mine was active in the early 1900's and it exposed other interesting minerals, such as large olivine crystals, large octahedral spinels, quartz and calcite. Collecting at this locality yielded beautiful spinels.
It all started one Sunday afternoon as we started hitting a boulder of basalt with a sledgehammer. To our surprise, a small vug revealed beautiful green drusy quartz covered with white and pink calcite cubes.
At Cummins Creek, numerous quartz veins are exposed in the creekbed and along the canyons. While exploring the surrounding area in the summer of 1998, we discovered a rare and amazing deposit of "Pineapple" quartz.
The Northern Lights Claim is located in the Whitesail Mountains approximately 90 air miles south of Houston, B.C. This newly discovered locality is one of the few alpine locations in the world where precious opal can be found.
The minerals from Mexico are well known to collectors around the world for their unusual and intrinsic beauty. This article reports on recent happenings and briefly introduces the novice collector to three well-known and important localities.
Rockhounding at Caland Lake,
The Caland pit is one three abandoned mines belonging to the Steep Rock Iron Mines mine site near Atikokan, Ontario. The mine site was closed twenty years ago, but in the past two decades it has undergone a minor miracle of naturalization. Join me on my first rockhounding expedition with Ray Bernatchez and a group of rockhounds from the Toronto area.
Scenic Stone
Scenic stone can found near Tlell on the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. When properly cut and polished, this stone reveals a naturally created landscape picture or scene.
The HBO Meteorite
The HBO Meteorite, the largest single meteorite known in the world today, is on the HBO farm situated near Grootfontein, Namibia. Curiously, no crater or altered rocks have been found associated with the impact site.
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