Fluorite with Quartz

specimen number:
9506498

location:
Les Droites, Mt Blanc Massif, Chamonix, Haute-Savoie, Rhone-Alpes, France

description:

Lovely pink octahedral crystals of fluorite, the largest to 4.0 cm in size, perched upon a completely crystallized light smoky quartz matrix. The fluorite crystals are semi lustrous and show translucency, they are naturally crystallized all around. There are no points of attachment. This was collected by C. Peray.

Les Droites is a prominent mountain in the Mont Blanc Massif of the French Alps, featuring two primary summits reaching an elevation of 4,000 meters. In terms of history, the mountain's west summit was first successfully climbed on July 16, 1876, by W.A.B. Coolidge with guides Christian and Ulrich Almer, while the higher east summit was conquered shortly after on August 7, 1876, by Thomas Middlemore and John Oakley Maund with Henri Cordier, Johann Jaun, and Andreas Maurer. Geologically, the massif is formed primarily of variscian intrusive granite and protogine that pushed through older metamorphic gneiss and schist basement rocks approximately 300 million years ago, subsequently uplifted during the Alpine Orogeny starting tens of millions of years ago, and heavily sculpted by extensive glacial action that carved its steep rock faces and sharp aretes.

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