Nature's Underground Treasure Trove

WULFERITE Fragile Jewel of the Underworld

In the barren foothills east of Tombstone, I dropped my truck into four-wheel drive and inched up a primitive road. On the side of a hill high above an old ghost town, the thick timbers of a mine's headframe came into view behind a small shed that looked like an abandoned outhouse.The headframe stood like a desiccated skeleton above a deep hole once a lead mine, one of the oldest mines in the area and the location of an uncommon mineral called wulfenite. Once mined for its lead content, Arizona wulfenite with its delicate crystals is now in demand among serious collectors throughout the world because of its beauty and relative scarcity - which is why my guide and I are about to make a journey into the dark belly of this desert mountain.

"Watch your footing," my guide warned as we donned hard hats and headlamps and began descending a series of wooden ladders that would lead 200 feet into the bowels of a limestone formation.At the bottom, the narrow shaft opened into a cavern about the size of a small living room, with drifts or tunnels leading to the left and right.

"Let's go over here to the left," my guide said, crawling through a dark opening that led to a space about as big as a closet. A short wooden plank ran from this small room to a ledge and a smaller room beyond, a space barely large enough for two adults to kneel side by side. The hiss of fresh air, pumped by a compressor 200 feet above, could be heard behind us. Once in the hole, our headlamps revealed a limestone cavity shaped like a narrow "V" lying on its side."Can you believe this?" my companion asked.We had crawled through the red dirt to a rock-ribbed cocoon that could have been a scene from a fantasy. In this tiny grotto, seashells from an ancient long-gone ocean had been transformed into whiteand rose-colored calcite crystals, some shaped like miniature trees, others like clusters of sparkling leaves, all of them clinging to limestone walls where pockets of wulfenite flashed gold and yellow in the beams of our headlamps.

"In June of 1992, miners first popped into this cavern," he said, "and opened a room, and what they saw were walls covered with long calcite crystals, and at the top was nothing but wulfenite. It looked like a jewelry box. Everything glittered."

As he spoke, he turned his head slightly to his right and did a double take as the light from his headlamp bounced off a golden eye embedded in the ledge near his shoulder.

"Can you see this?" he asked, running his fingers along the edges of a piece of wulfenite with inch-long tabular crystals jutting in every direction. Using a steel chisel, he gently pried at the edges, but nothing moved. Then he tried a small screwdriver with a bent tip. Still nothing. Power tools were out of the question. Wulfenite crystals are brittle and easily destroyed.

"Wow! How am I going to get that out without screwing it up?"

For the next 20 minutes he pushed and prodded, cutting his fingers on the razorsharp calcite crystals that formed a protective web around the wulfenite. "This one's not going anyplace today," he decided.

Miners operated the mine during World War II. Hardworking immigrants, they did not spend much time marveling at the slabs of honey-colored wulfenite crystals they encountered. They knew that wulfenite contained lead, which meant it could be sent to the smelter and converted into cash. In the beginning, they didn't realize it also could be sold to mineral collectors.

By 1960 all work had ceased at the mine, mainly because the miners reached retirement age. However, a few years before they made their last trip off the hill, a visitor to the mine evidently spotted the wulfenite deposits and let them know there was a market for it among museums and individual collectors.

Today a choice specimen of wulfenite like one with huge tabular crystals that's currently owned by a Tucson mineral dealer - will sell for roughly $15,000.

Wulfenite is named for Franz Xavier

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP, LEFT)

J. VACEK COLLECTION

MARVIN PAUSCH COLLECTION

From the Red Cloud Mine. RAY GRANT AND

ED SCHAEFFER COLLECTION

Wulfen, a Jesuit priest who wrote an extensive description of a deposit he found in Bleiberg, Carinthia, Austria, in 1758. Some of the world's best specimens have been collected in Arizona mines, especially the Red Cloud in the Trigo Mountains north of Yuma, the Mammoth-St. Anthony Mine at Tiger in Pinal County, and the Glove in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson.

The demand for lead ores has diminished since World War II, and the cost of operating these small mines has led to their demise, my guide said.

While many mine operators historically loaded wulfenite with the rest of the ore they were shipping to a smelter for its lead content and paid little attention to collectors, one collector said the mineral has been prized since at least the turn of the century.

"It's always been a very desirable thing for collectors, but the prices were not as high as they are now," he said. "Even in the 1920s, every mineral cabinet - that's what collectors called their display that had wulfenite from the Red Cloud was considered a good cabinet. Very few of those specimens ever got out of the U.S. Some of the finest wulfenite specimens around today, from the deep red crystals of the Red Cloud to the translucent pyramid crystals from the Glove or the MammothSt. Anthony Mine at Tiger, can be seen at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson or the Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum in Phoenix.