The Monastery Prospecting Trip 2/12
My friend Jacob and I are pretty good at prospecting and mineral collecting, and over the years have found many good locations to collect a variety of cool minerals. One of our favorite places is the beryl pegmatites of Storm Mountain, and we decided to explore a new area near one of our most productive locations. The Monastery is a large collection of granite outcrops and fins that offers tons of climbing routes in a pretty cool corner of the woods. The formations of The Monastery are interesting to climbers and geologists alike, as the granite is very coarse grained(pegmatitic) which allows for the individual mineral constituents of the granite to grow to large enough size to be worth extracting. Granite is most usually comprised of quartz, feldspar, muscovite and horneblend but Storm Mountain also has large amounts of blue/green beryl, some of which approaches the quality of aquamarine. Satellite images of the Bobcat Fire burn area reveals hundreds of long, thin pegmatites scattered on the lower slopes of Storm Mountain.
We pulled off near the Hyatt Mine, which was a very productive beryl mine in World War II. There is a well worn climbers trail that starts at a sharp curve in the road and leads west, dropping in and out of a gulch before returning to the burn area. The trail takes you through some small aspen groves and over pegmatites as it descends to The Monastery. Once we reached a good place to drop the packs, we began prospecting the nearby rock outcrops, fins and veins.
There are thousands of black tourmalines on the surface of the rocks, including some that were several inches in diameter and smaller ones up to a foot in length. Black tourmalines are pretty common, but we were having trouble locating the beryl we were searching for. Eventually I found something unexpected, a golf ball sized red garnet stuck in a vein. As a carefully chiseled away the softer granite around it, I was able to remove it intact and found that there were some very cool facets that had been preserved on the face that was held in the rock. While garnets are somewhat common, they are usually pretty small and I haven't found many in Larimer County. After retrieving the prized garnet, we followed the vein just 20 feet away and found a few beryl columns that we'd be able to extract. Due to beryl's slender crystal form, they usually break into smaller pieces while chipping them out. Thankfully, we were able to remove them without completely destroying them, which is why we took pictures of them beforehand. After returning to our packs, I put up my hammock and had lunch before heading back to the car.
We pulled off near the Hyatt Mine, which was a very productive beryl mine in World War II. There is a well worn climbers trail that starts at a sharp curve in the road and leads west, dropping in and out of a gulch before returning to the burn area. The trail takes you through some small aspen groves and over pegmatites as it descends to The Monastery. Once we reached a good place to drop the packs, we began prospecting the nearby rock outcrops, fins and veins.
There are thousands of black tourmalines on the surface of the rocks, including some that were several inches in diameter and smaller ones up to a foot in length. Black tourmalines are pretty common, but we were having trouble locating the beryl we were searching for. Eventually I found something unexpected, a golf ball sized red garnet stuck in a vein. As a carefully chiseled away the softer granite around it, I was able to remove it intact and found that there were some very cool facets that had been preserved on the face that was held in the rock. While garnets are somewhat common, they are usually pretty small and I haven't found many in Larimer County. After retrieving the prized garnet, we followed the vein just 20 feet away and found a few beryl columns that we'd be able to extract. Due to beryl's slender crystal form, they usually break into smaller pieces while chipping them out. Thankfully, we were able to remove them without completely destroying them, which is why we took pictures of them beforehand. After returning to our packs, I put up my hammock and had lunch before heading back to the car.
