Tourmaline on Quartz

This is a classic Tourmaline Queen tourmaline from the old days, the 1950s or early 60s, predating the modern era of commercial specimen mining in San Diego. It has a dramatic, intensely colored crystal of the classic Queen pink color, capped by a subtle zoned termination, and the tourmaline is in superb condition with no major damage and no repairs! The piece was sitting in a collection in a rock shop in the middle of nowhere, when I found it for sale in early 2010. It was a big clunker, in which this tourmaline and the quartz point you see were embedded within a massive chunk of quartz that had to be carefully removed, by whittling it down with small vibrating tools, to bring the piece to a more balanced size (with some risk!). It was purchased from Bill Larson of Pala Intl back in the mid- 1970s and the disappeared til now - a rarified example of matrix tourmalines from the mine which really defined San Diego tourmalines for much of the 1900s until the Himalaya Mine came back online as a specimen producer in the mid 1970s. Joe Budd photos