Covellite with Pyrite

specimen number:
2262247

location:
Summitville, Colorado, USA

description:
A massive iridescent covellite with pyrite. The specimen comes with a previous label that certainly dates to the 1960s or early 1970s.

The Summitville mining district, situated at an elevation of over eleven thousand feet in the San Juan Mountains of Rio Grande County, Colorado, is a world-famous locality renowned for producing exceptionally sharp, highly iridescent crystals of the copper sulfide mineral covellite. Geologically, this deposit is classified as a classic high-sulfidation epithermal gold-copper system hosted within the Neogene-age Summitville Andesite, which underwent intense acid-sulfate hydrothermal alteration associated with a collapsing volcanic caldera. Deep-seated, highly acidic and copper-rich fluids ascended along vertical fault fractures and breccia pipes, leaching the host rock to form a porous vuggy silica matrix where copper sulfides precipitated as magnificent, sharp, tabular plates and bladed clusters of covellite, exhibiting a characteristic deep indigo-blue color with a brilliant purple to brassy iridescence. Historically, gold was first discovered in the district in 1870, triggering a major high-altitude mining boom that saw underground operations and shallow surface quarrying reach peak production between 1875 and 1890 at claims like the Iowa and Chandler mines. Mining was conducted sporadically through the early to mid-20th century until the site was converted into a massive, corporate open-pit heap-leach gold mining operation by Galactic Resources from 1984 until 1992, an extraction phase that culminated in bankruptcy and a severe environmental disaster that required extensive federal Superfund remediation.

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