CALIFORNIA GOLD SPECIMEN IN QUARTZ HOST

This neat crystalline gold specimen comes mounted in a very attractive display box and is labeled with the mine district, county, and state location.

Specimen Origin and Details:
Harvard Open Pit Mine, Jamestown, Tuolumne County, California
Measures: 18 x 11 x 7 mm
Most of the gold is in the matrix, only the edges are just a little bit sticking out of the milky quartz.

About Crystalline Gold: Crystalline gold is among the rarest and most beautiful forms of gold and California Crystalline gold is especially valued by collectors all over the world because of its bright color and unique shapes.

Crystalline gold values are not based on weight but rather the shape and configuration of the piece.

The specimen(s) listed here are far more beautiful than they appear from the pictures. Crystalline gold is very hard to photograph because it is so bright and flashy, the pictures cannot begin to do the specimens any justice.

About this piece: An affordable piece of California Natural History with good shape, pure gold color and clean host rock makes it a very worthy specimen to add to your collection inexpensively.

Crystalline gold is very delicate and hard to extract due to very costly mining expenses. Crystalline gold is usually embedded in quartz and other minerals and can cost, as much as, five times the price of nuggets. Some of the other minerals include: silver, pyrite and lead. The gold varies in color from deep yellow to orange and red. These samples and nuggets are not sold by weight, but by size and uniqueness of the specimen.

Origin:
Some 4 million years ago, gold was pushed up through the earth's crust to this and many other locations. However, at this particular spot, thermo steam at over 4000 degrees F. also came up, forcing crystallized gold into the quartz rock. Blowing apart the quartz, yields one of nature's rarest forms of gold -- crystalline gold. To a collector, it can be worth as much as $3000 dollars or more an ounce.