Stibnite

Day 101: This is a long walk from the realm of Botany, but I've had another relapse and am getting desperate for bloggable material. That said, I've been interested in other sciences off and on since I was a very small child, and geology/mineralogy filled much of my teenage years. I was forever bringing home pocketsful of rocks (an improvement on tent caterpillars, I suppose), and over the course of time, found a number of examples of unusual native materials including several zeolites. However, true to my nature as a Crow, I longed after other shiny objects, and by the time I was in my early 20s, I'd begun a collection of quality thumbnail specimens. A rockhounding friend had an enormous museum-grade stibnite cluster over which I drooled every time I was in her shop. Eventually, I found a stibnite I could afford (according to the price tag, it cost me all of $5). It has remained one of my most prized specimens despite competition from more brightly coloured and showier pieces. It came from Czechoslovakia. Stibnite is a relatively soft (2.0 Mohs) metallic sulfide (Sb₂S₃) and occurs in long prismatic crystals.

Geology Rocks!

Day 244: It's June and time for interpretive training! Today's subject was the geology of Mount Rainier, and while I think geology rocks, eight and a half hours is a long time to sit in a chair listening to speakers, even excellent ones like Tom Sisson, Carolyn Driedger and Paul Kennard. I learned a lot, and took advantage of lunch break to grab a mineral specimen from home for "show-and-tell" with the professionals. I'm none the wiser for having taken it back for analysis, but Tom Sisson took a sample of the green radiating crystals which he's promised to subject to tests in order to make an identification. I'm looking forward to finally having a name to put on a specimen I've carted around for more than thirty years!