Hyalite opal mineral / gem specimen Spruce Pine NC fluorescent unique locale

Description

Hyalite opal mineral / gem specimen Spruce Pine NC fluorescent unique locale
Back around 1970 or so, a buddy and I stumbled across a pocket of hyalite opal in a very small prospect just off the road, not far from the McKinney Mine in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. To the best of my knowledge the prospect had no name. I’ve been unable to find it since—it may have been destroyed years ago during road improvements—so, as far as I know what I have here is all there is, forever, from that locale.
The pocket itself was about as big as an end table, horizontal, with hyalite on both the top and bottom surfaces. The pegmatite on the top was already starting to fracture and some of the pieces had fallen; others were loose enough that you could pull them out by hand. The hyalite on those specimens was attached to the matrix.
Curiously, the hyalite on the bottom had detached from the pegmatite and was just lying there, loose. It was also a slightly different color from the hyalite above—a little more of a tan-golden color, whereas the hyalite from up top was very pale, close to colorless.
It’s fluorescent, in the green color typical of hyalite from other Spruce Pine locales such as the Chalk Mountain Mine or McKinney Mine.
I’ve got a couple of specimens in my cabinet but the rest of this is just sitting and that’s no way to treat perfectly good specimens. With that in mind, I’m going to put up a series of auctions on eBay to release these to people who will love and admire them properly.
ABOUT THIS BATCH:
Batch #3
NOTE: This is the third and final batch of loose hyalite—if you want it, bid now. It’s all hyalite on matrix after this.
These fragments came from the bottom of the pocket. For scale, the black foam tray is 7-1/8” x 9-1/4”. The hyalite is tannish to cream colored. Most pieces (meaning 99% of them) are pretty much pure hyalite;
a few
may have a little pegmatite matrix attached to them. As you can see from the photos, they vary in how strongly they fluoresce. Some of the variation is due to the pieces having one side that fluoresces more strongly than the other, top vs. bottom. Some is simple variation from piece to piece.
In total, the hyalite weighs a little over 130 grams. Taken as a whole, there’s more hyalite in this batch than there was on any of the entire specimens that I’ve sold—it’s just loose, rather than anchored to matrix. It’s also the largest of the three batches of loose pieces.
I’ve spent a lot of time pondering why the hyalite from the bottom of the cavity was loose and a slightly different color than the material just an inch or two away...never been able to convince myself that I had a solid answer to the question. It’s fun to speculate, but I don’t have a time machine to go back and watch the stuff being formed; for now I just regard it as a nifty brain teaser.
The matrix (to the extent that there might be enough to identify as such) is pegmatite, meaning quartz, feldspar, and mica, with a few garnets or, more precisely:
Albite, var: Oligoclase
Mica, var: Muscovite
Mica, var: Biotite
Garnet, var: Almandine
Quartz
This auction is for pieces of hyalite opal from Spruce Pine, Mitchell County, NC. Buyer pays USPS Flat Rate shipping to United States only.