We worked the spoil piles until late-afternoon and found lots of wonderful specimens. We carefully wrapped them and made our way back down to Wickenburg just before the sun set. "Carefully wrapped" takes on a whole new dimension when you have miles of bone jarring roads to negotiate back to town. The following are examples of what we found that day.

Click on each specimen picture to enlarge

Click on each specimen picture to enlarge

Friday was our day to visit the Purple Passion Mine. This mine is located approximately 1 mile north of the Monarch Mine, and we had actually passed its entrance road while going out to the Monarch the previous day. According to Ed Davis and Bill Gardner, who currently have a claim on the mine, "The Purple Passion mine(originally known as the Diamond Joe mine) is located approximately 8 miles northeast of Wickenburg, Arizona (60 miles north & west of Phoenix).Through the years, the surrounding property has occasionally yielded small quantities of minerals and current activity is producing a fair amount of good quality wulfenite specimens. In addition to the usual tabular wulfenite crystal shape, the Purple Passion mine produces several very odd crystal habits of wulfenite such as acicular (needles) and epitaxal needle growth over tabular crystals ("fuzzy tabs"). The wulfenite displays many colors and also occurs on a wide variety of matrices, such as wulfenite on quartz (clear, smokey, milky and amethyst) and wulfenite on fluorite, calcite or galena. Other associations include anglesite, cerussite, sulfur, chloragyrite, smithsonite and willemite. In addition to the odd associations, some of the calcite, fluorite, wulfenite and willemite are strongly fluorescent." (from a 2001 Mineralogical Record article and used with permission from Bill Gardner. Permission to collect at the Purple Passion must be obtained from Bill Gardner or Ed Davis (www.fluorescents.com/main2.htm).