Description

Detailed Description

This is a beautiful large, sharp, singly-terminated crystal of epidote. Brilliant lustre, one termination face has a curious more frosted appearance, and there is some quartz/albite frosting around the back of the specimen. In excellent condition – no damage. You may notice that there is some kind of hollow near the top of the prism faces in one spot – it’s not clear to me how that formed, but it is fully crystallized as can be seen in the sixth photo, it is not damage.

Out of interest, with magnification you can see tiny sharp transparent blue-green amphibole crystals on the back of this crystal (maybe up to 1 mm or so). The lustre is so high, I tried to limit reflection in some of the photos to give a good sense of the colour and aspect of the specimen.

A gorgeous epidote crystal for display.

About These Epidotes

Even though the finest quality epidotes from Pakot rank among the world’s finest, to date not much has been written about them. The find occurred in 2002 in North Eastern Province, which was known at the time as Northern Frontier District, or NFD. It is noted by Tom Moore in his write-up of the 2003 Tucson show (The Mineralogical Record, May-June, 2003, Vol. 34:3). The deposit, described as a metamorphic skarn, was worked by Wayne Thompson and the late, famous African mineral explorer Campbell Bridges. This is a remote area of Kenya, home to tribal communities and is sometimes a conflict region, so mineral specimen collecting is not an easy or frequent matter – this 2002 find was remarkable.