Crystals from Alaska

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We find all our own crystals, many coming from locations that only we know. Our crystals are carefully cleaned and trimmed to maximize their aesthetic appeal. We have everything from "thumbnails" to large show pieces for museum display. Museums worldwide - from Idar Oberstein in Germany to Wrangell, Alaska to Tokyo, Japan - have crystals acquired from us. We have assembled and curated the mineral displays of several Alaskan museums.

The crystals we sell were collected primarily in the 1980s. Most of our medium quality were sold by the lot shortly after their finding. What is available now are higher quality items trimmed from our personal collection.

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FLUORITE

We have three locations for fluorite crystals. Found in small seams, none of the locations are prolific. All are beach locations that can only be worked at low tide. (Much of the rest of Southeast Alaska is covered by either glaciers or dense rainforest, where nothing can be found.) The crystals from Kuiu Island are cubic in structure. They can be clear, green, or purple. A few have a distinct purple-green color zoning. The fluorite crystals from Prince of Wales Island are cubic and are clear to light green. Some have a druzy quartz coating. The fluorite from Zarembo Island, now very rare, is octahedral. It is clear to green. Some fluoresce blue.

QUARTZ STALACTITES WITH BARRERITE CRYSTALS

Barrerite is a very rare zeolite mineral. Until the Kuiu Island, Alaska find, it had been reported only from Sardinia, an island off the coast of Italy. In crystal structure, barrerite looks like stilbite, a much more common zeolite mineral. Barrerite is a sodium zeolite, whereas stilbite is a calcium zeolite. The barrerite from Sardinia is seldom larger than micro in size. Up to several inches in length, the barrerite crystals from Kuiu are by far the biggest and best of their kind in the world. They are usually attached to druzy quartz structures, often stalactitic, that can be very aesthetic. One quartz "finger" in our collection measures nine inches long. Beautiful display pieces, they are "natural sculpture" in themselves. Our Kuiu Island specimens combine extreme rarity - the barrerite - and great beauty - the sparkly quartz formations. Other zeolites from this locality include: heulandite, epistilbite, chabazite, analcime, natrolite, laumontite,

OTHER CRYSTALLIZED MINERALS

Stone Arts of Alaska has a limited number of other crystallized mineral species for sale: calcite (of various habits and locations), pyrite (cubic from Hotspur Island), almandine garnet from Wrangell and Mitkof Island), andradite garnet (Kasaan Peninsula of Prince of Wales), magnetite (Prince of Wales), epidote (Kasaan Peninsula of Prince of Wales), magnetite Prince of Wales), barite Kuiu Island), "tessin" habit quartz Kuiu Island).

NON-CRYSTALLIZED MINERALS

We also have some excellent samples of non-crystallized Alaskan minerals: bornite, covallite, chalcopyrite, malachite, chrysocolla, cuprite, molybdenite, pyrite, obsidian, barite, rhodonite, chalcedony, piemontite, and eudialyte.

see our Alaskan crystal collection on display in Bellingham, Wa.

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