Ysp(Xm) · Pegmatitic granite

Pegmatitic Ysp(Xm) #001

Giant crystals the gold-rush miners threw away.

$7,000

The miners of Colorado's Gold rushes dreamed of deep veins of gold & silver ore, and giant crystals of valuable gems; yet they callously threw aside this spectacular stone full of massive crystaline quartz pegmatite while clearing a wagon road to a mine high on the mountains near Empire Colorado.

I've redeemed them of their folly & lack of artistic vision by recapturing and reframing the intrinsic beauty and centerpiece potential of this (very heavy) piece of Colorado's geology.

Dimensions: 28 × 14 × 18 in
Weight: 190.5 lb
Age: 1,422 ± 2 Ma
Formation: Pinedale glaciation / gold-rush discard

Sourced nearEmpire, COBelow Lincoln Mountain

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Magicians know how to exploit perspective & apparent proportionality in fun and clever ways, and still could never dance the wild lines of improbability that geochemistry & erosion & time wrought with this stone

Sneaking in just under the wire, during the final 'seconds' of the last hot gasps of the Silver Plume granites' intrusion into what would eventually be settled as the town of Empire Colorado; we find this wildly beautiful expression of hot intrusive igneous fluid surrendering and relaxing into the comfort of massive crystaline structure

The minerals in this sink and I are always the last ones to leave a party, but they more successfully commemorated the fun past by laying down next to each other and locking into perfect echos and patterns as the solution exhausted all the other more 'bland' minerals, and cooled into stone cold quiet

The pegmatite band that this stone formed inside of had to be at least several feet wide, a moltent and intractable twisting path carved into rock that lived above what we now call 'Lincoln Mountain'; a path lost to time and the scratching Laramide orogeny until the Bull Lake glaciation (my theory, scant hard evidence) cracked it loose from the embedding Felsic Gniess (Xf), where it waited a couple hundred thousand more years before the Pindale glaciation ground off all the hard corners by throwing it down into the valley (more than theory, 98% chance that's true) before some gold rush miner rolled it out of the way of the wagon road (100% probability, that definitely happened)

I played with the thickness of this stone in several ways: to higlight and showcase the massive phenocrysts and contrast them with the fascinating shapes and colors of the 'smaller' aphantic matrix embedding them, with edges and contours that hopefully entice you to grip all the sides with human sized hands and appreciate their heft, and also for the pure structural reality that this was an endlessly difficult stone to cut without shattering/fracturing.

Raw pegmatite pieces with large quartz, feldspar and mica crystals on a workbench, with toy figures for scale

From the shop

Stone & Carving notes

Initially I tried to split the upper 1/3rd of the stone into a separate piece to use as a shallower sink.

After sawing in a guidance groove for my desired fracture plane, I drilled 7 bore holes around 270 degrees of circumference, tensioned my steel splitter pins, and then failed spectacularly.

It was the first of many signs that this would be an immensely intricate stone to carve.

What I thought was a small section of giant quartz crystals proved to instead be the story of the entire stone, with the entire volume being made up of large distinct crystaline structures welded together in a tense & temporary equillibrium.

Hammering & chiselling had to be used sparingly, replaced instead by far more frequent and obliquely angled cuts with the diamond saw. Many of the usual percussive techniques called for the small diamond saw used at weird angles instead

It eventually proved an almost fun constraint to work around, but that may have just been because the rock was so varied and interesting that no cut felt boring or repetitive.

In addition to the different cutting speed/pressure adjustments needed when moving between adjacent crystals of different minerals, thick books of mica appearead in pockets at all kinds of angles throughout the stone.

Picture a magical paper book that defies a spinning saw set down on the top page, but lets the pages rip apart if you instead cut the side of the book, perpendicular to all the pages at once.

USGS map description of Ysp, Silver Plume Granite (Middle Proterozoic): pink to pinkish-gray granite of microcline, plagioclase and quartz with minor biotite and muscovite; age 1,422 ± 2 Ma

Geology

Silver Plume Granite, Ysp

This stone was so thoroughly covered in moss & lichen when I found it, that I didn't really realize what I had on the end of my crane.

There were a couple larger quartz-y chunks showing, and a handfull of fun 'books' of mica flakes protruding, but it would have to wait till an hilarious failure to split the stone, and the subsequent the pressure-washing of the surface for me to realize that this giant stone was improbably made entirely of pegmatite.

Pegmatite generally forms when almost all the fluid has been exhausted and crystalized into the larger body, but a small fraction remains that is unusally rich in the more rare minerals of the parent solution.

The environment is (relatively) colder than when the rest of the surrounding rock formed, and the unique chemistry of the solution means that it's often times easier for minerals and ions to find an existing solid crystaline structure to latch onto than to start their own new one.

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Custom sinks carved from the Rockies.

Tell me about your space and which stone caught your eye. Come see it in person at the shop, or let's dream up something unique to match your vision, and I'll go find it in the wild.

Stone Wood & Steel12550 W Colfax Ave #105, Lakewood, CO 80215720 · 357 · 0089 [email protected]

Painted Routt Plutonic sign on a reclaimed-wood wall at the shop, with raw stones piled below