Spessartine

specimen number:
8311514

location:
Little Three Mine, San Diego Co., California, USA

description:

Beautiful lustrous translucent mostly complete brilliant orange crystal of spessartine with little attached matrix. In good condition.

The Little Three mine, located just east of Ramona in San Diego County, California, United States, is a historically significant gem pegmatite operation renowned for its production of fine spessartine, schorl, and gemmy blue topaz crystals. Geologically, this relatively narrow, shallowly dipping deposit is part of the Ramona pegmatite district, where a series of late Cretaceous-age granitic pegmatite dikes intruded into the surrounding tonalite and norite host rocks of the Peninsular Ranges Batholith. The mineralization is concentrated within a highly asymmetrical, layered pegmatite structure containing a distinct central pocket zone, where complex magmatic-hydrothermal fluids cooled slowly to allow sharp, orange spessartine crystals, lustrous black tourmaline, and topaz to develop inside open pockets lined with cleavelandite albite and lepidolite. Historically, the property was discovered in May 1903 by Dan McIntosh and was worked intermittently for gemstones throughout the early twentieth century, but its most famous era of modern development occurred between 1975 and the late 1990s under the ownership and targeted operation of Louis B. Spaulding, Jr. Spaulding utilized open-cut quarrying and careful heavy machinery trenching along the strike of the dike, culminating in the historic 1976 discovery of the New Spaulding Pocket, which yielded world-class combinations of bright orange spessartine on smoky quartz and schorl matrix. Through 2026, commercial open-pit extraction and regular specimen production at the site have ceased, and the mine remains closed to general collecting, serving as an important regional type example and an educational benchmark for studying mineral zonation within thin, highly fractionated granitic pegmatite sheets.

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