Arrests Made in Robbery of Gold at California State Mineral Museum in Mariposa

Arrests have been made in the robbery of gold specimens and other minerals from the California State Mining and Mineral Museum in Mariposa last September. Four suspects have been arrested by the California Highway Patrol, but there is no news yet as to whether the stolen specimens have been recovered. Details can be found here, and here.

It has never been made clear which nuggests were stolen, but they didn't get away with the biggest and most famous nugget, the Fricot (top picture) because it was displayed in a fortified safe that the thieves couldn't breach. The other nuggests pictured here were probably part of the loot, as they were in display cases with thinner windows (the robbers had pickaxes).

The samples are especially significant because they show a rare aspect of gold nuggets: crystal form, especially that shown below.

I'm glad they have caught the (alleged) thugs, and I hope they recover these beautiful specimens.

Destroying Our Heritage: California Mining and Mineral Museum Raided

It makes me sick at heart...

A closeup of the Fricot Nugget

I just can't believe how low some people will go that they would destroy historical treasures that belong to all of us. I see the sickness in the wanton destruction of cliff dwellings and graves of our Native American ancestors by pothunters. I see it in the criminal who took a knife and killed an iconic Jeffrey Pine that once graced the summit of Sentinel Dome in Yosemite National Park. I see it in the destruction of entire forests by the sick action of arsonists. And now the sickness hits ever closer to home...

The 13.8 pound Fricot Nugget

We had one of the nicest mineral exhibits to be found anywhere, at the California Mining and Mineral Museum in Mariposa up in the Sierra Nevada foothills. It was a favorite stop during many of my field trips to the Mother Lode, and we just fought a long battle to prevent its closure by a financially strapped state government.

A large sample of benitoite (the state gemstone) and neptunite in matrix. These are found at a single locality in the Coast Ranges of California

On Friday, two thugs in black masks waving pick axes terrorized the museum volunteers, and broke into the exhibits, stealing numerous priceless gold and gem specimens. The stories on the theft mention a $2 million heist, but I do not know the origin of that number.

Benitoite, the California State gemstone

The robbery was nearly stymied by the security system, because when the thieves tried to hammer their way into the safe containing the Fricot Nugget (see the top two pictures), the system started to close the vault doors, almost trapping the thugs inside. I guess one of them wedged his body in the door and they escaped, taking what specimens they could grab. The area was flooded with law enforcement personnel in moments, but no arrests have been made yet. The Fricot Nugget was not taken (it was in a separate more heavily fortified vault).

Benitoite specimen

I have no inside information about what was taken, but I've been documenting the vault specimens for years on this blog. They include numerous beautiful crystalline gold samples as well as the more normal rounded nuggets.

Crystalline gold

What drives people to do such sick things? Yeah, greed, I know. I can't imagine how they could think they could sell these things in a pawnshop. These samples are famous enough that gold dealers  wouldn't touch them. Melting them down turns these samples from priceless to mere gold, and the actual poundage isn't that much: a few thousand dollars, maybe. All for a meth fix, I guess. Worthless human garbage.

More crystalline gold

I trust that the morons who did this thing would never read a blog like this, and I don't care. I just hope you brag to someone, that you try and sell these samples to a reputable dealer. Because I want to see your sorry worthless asses tossed in jail for a long time.

Isometric gold specimen

I am sorry if you never had a chance to see these beautiful specimens that graced the museum. I am sorry for the trauma suffered by the volunteers who were also victims in this crime. These people give of their time so the museum can stay open. I hope the stolen minerals can be returned to their rightful place so the experience of seeing these treasures can be shared by all.

Leaf gold from the now-closed Harvard Open Pit Mine

Here are a few examples of past blogs about the Fricot Nugget and other specimens at the Mineral Museum:
http://geotripper.blogspot.com/2010/07/other-california-ca-state-mineral.html, http://geotripper.blogspot.com/2008/03/beyond-dreams-of-avaricesierra-gold.html, http://geotripper.blogspot.com/2012/03/priceless-collection-of-minerals-to-see.html.

A Priceless Collection of Minerals: To see, or not to see

I was in the field yesterday with my students, and one of our stops was at the California State Mining and Mineral Museum in Mariposa at the south end of the California Mother Lode. I am offering up a selection of photos of some of the finest mineral specimens you will ever see anywhere, but I hope you will read to the end of this post as you look at them. Enjoy!

The first few images are some of the striking specimens of crystalline gold. Gold crystallizes in the isometric crystal system (three equal axes at ninety degrees), but the crystals themselves are rarely seen because gold is so malleable that the structure is lost the moment the mineral rolls in a stream.

Gold crystals, then, instead of gold nuggets. They are just gorgeous, and priceless, because the vast majority of crystal specimens were melted into bullion along with all the other gold during the gold rush days, even the biggest single nugget, one that weighed close to 200 pounds.

 You just don't expect gold to look like this.

Or this...when the Harvard open-pit mine was operating in the 1980's and was about to close down, the miners hit a rich pocket. Mine employees who had hardly ever seen even a small bit of gold in the disseminated ores were surprised to see a 60 pound chunk of gold pass by on the conveyor belt. It was composes of leaf gold, a crystalline variety composed of...um...leaf-like flakes of gold. The entire mass was preserved and can be seen at the Ironstone Winery at Murphys, but a large flake can be seen above.

And then there is the Fricot Nugget. The 13.6 pound nugget is the largest single gold mass preserved from the Gold Rush Days, having been discovered in 1865. It lay a long time in a safe deposit box, almost completely forgotten. It came to the state collection in 1943.

An exceedingly rare mineral is a beautiful blue sapphire-like gem called benitoite. It is found at a single mine in the California Coast Ranges. It was designated the California state gemstone in 1985.

The sample below includes two very rare minerals. The black mineral is neptunite, which is often found in association with the benitoite.

Another unique mineral assemblage in California comes from the pegmatite veins in San Diego and Riverside counties. These veins contain immense crystals of quartz, feldspar, muscovite mica, and a group of rare gemstones, most notably tourmaline. For a time in the early 1920's tourmaline was the most prized gem in China, and many incredible crystals were exported.

Other minerals came to the state from all over the world. Below is a striking example of beryl (aquamarine), a relative of emerald.

And sulfur crystals deposited on aragonite crystals...

And some beautiful crystallized azurite and malachite, ores of copper.

And opal from the Virgin Valley in Nevada...

Another example of pegmatite contains a form of feldspar called amazonite.

Some more spectacular azurite crystals.

The crystals below are wulfenite, an important ore of molybdenum and lead.

And finally, the museum has an excellent exhibit of meteorite specimens, including this cross-section of the crystallized elemental iron of the Giant Goose Meteorite, which fell in Modoc County in 1938. The original weighed over a ton.

Wouldn't you just love to see these incredible rare specimens for themselves? I can assure you that it is a great exhibit, quite worthy of a short diversion on your way to Yosemite National Park. But you don't get to see them. You may never get to see them ever again. Why? Because the California State Mining and Mineral Museum is on the state closure list, one of 70 parks to be closed and shuttered because of cuts of $22 million to the state park system, approximately 70 pennies for each inhabitant of the state. I am incensed that the people of our state legislature are so incredibly short-sighted as to allow this to happen.

I feel hopeless sometimes at the stupidity I see. State parks generate economic activity, they don't drain it. Closing these parks makes no sense at all. Mitchell Caverns has already closed, and vandals have already done grievous damage. It will cost so much more to re-open these parks once they have been degraded. And yet that is what our government has decided to do, come June. I don't quite know what would work to change this, but one can start by letting your legislators know how you feel about this. The parks have few friends in the legislature obviously, but the politicos might listen to someone besides their ever-present lobbyists if they heard from their constituents. Who knows? There is a facebook page for the California State Mines and Mineral Museum, and there is the California State Parks Foundation, the best place to get information on how to proceed politically.

I know that blogs are places for the writing of many words, but I have few enough words that can express my disgust at the members of the state legislature and government for allowing this to happen.

California's Shame: The State Mineral Exhibit to Close; What will you do with your 58 cents?

For the lack of $22 million dollars, 70 California State Parks are closing. That's 58 cents for each resident of the state (thanks to Christy Rowe for pointing out the numbers). Now those in higher tax brackets (and their bought-and-paid-for representatives in the legislature) who think they pay too much for the right to be rich will argue that it really means a nickel from each of us and a whole 3 or 4 dollars from them. Well, whatever. The state parks of California are the real jewels of our state, and closing them costs each of us money in lost tourism. Just ask the folks in Mariposa, home of the California State Mining and Mineral Exhibit. It's one of the parks slated to close, and it is truly a gem (in fact, lots of gems, literally). It's ironic. The state mineral, which symbolizes our state, is gold, and the largest nugget remaining from the Gold Rush days is in this museum. Here is a blog entry from the Other California series that I posted on July 31st of last year:

The CA State Mineral Museum - this is art, darnit!

I know it when I see it. Purveyors of that which we would not call art would use shiny perfect minerals that would cause the viewer to objectify the image, and desire to possess it without appreciating or respecting the intrinsic value and quality of the mineral. I would never stoop that low just to get readership here at Geotripper. Just ignore the "xxx" and "big gold nuggets" in the blog tags. Besides, these things are in a museum. That makes this art, darnit!
And what a great museum it is! One would think that the official state mineral collection would be housed in the state capitol somewhere, or in San Francisco or Los Angeles. The collection actually was in San Francisco for many years, surviving the 1906 earthquake, but in 1983 the collection was moved to Mariposa in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode, where it resides in the California State Mining and Mineral Museum, a unit of the state park system. The choice of Mariposa makes a certain amount of historical sense, as the town hosted one of the very first hardrock mines and mills during the Gold Rush, the Mariposa, discovered by Kit Carson and ultimately owned by John C. Fremont, two of the big players in early state history.

One of the premier attractions of the collection is the Fricot nugget (that's a part of it at the top of the page), the largest single remaining nugget from the Gold Rush days, at 13.8 pounds. It sits in a vault within a vault. Most large nuggets were simply melted down (there is a larger nugget at the Ironstone Winery, but it was found in the 1990's at the Harvard Mine). There is a facsimile of the biggest nugget ever found, which originally weighed in at around 200 pounds.

The other smaller gold sample shown above is extraordinary as it shows the crystalline nature of the metal. The mineral forms octahedral crystals, but they aren't seen often because the malleable metal gets pounded into the more familiar nugget shape while being rolled in a stream. Samples like this one have to come from the quartz veins in mines.


The museum has a spectacular collection of other minerals, including some of the best specimens of our state gemstone benitoite. This exceedingly rare sapphire-like crystal is found at a single locality in the world, a serpentine outcrop in the Coast Ranges of San Benito County.

The museum has a host of other minerals on display, like the malachite sample above, and the aquamarine sample below. There are some excellent interpretive exhibits regarding the history and current state of mining in California, and even a 175 foot long tunnel that recreates a gold mine.

Admission is $4.00, but they offer discounts for school field trips (call in advance). The staff and volunteers are knowledgeable and helpful. The museum is located on Highway 49 just south of the town of Mariposa at the county fairgrounds. Unfortunately, the museum has been one of the pawns in the state budget wars, and has been threatened with closure off and on. It could use some friends in the capitol...

The Other California is part of my continuing explorations of the California that you don't always find on the postcards.

A Day in the Field...Doing Geology in the Mother Lode

The state flower growing in the state rock next to a site where the state mineral was being mined...the only thing missing was the state mammal, and it's been missing for 80 years. On second thought, I would prefer not to have run into our state mammal anyway. It's the California grizzly, after all. I am talking about an early spring arrival California poppy growing in an exposure of serpentine along a fault in California's Mother Lode where gold was being mined from the 1850's through the 1930's. I was in the field last Saturday!

It's been an emotionally tough week. The sorrow and grief over the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, compounded by the ongoing meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant has been bearing down on most of us. We face draconian budget cuts in our state educational system, and friends and fellow workers received layoff notices this week. Science is under attack at a time when it needs to be upheld as a way of working through serious and profound problems that face society in agriculture, energy and climate change. But the right questions aren't even being asked or discussed.

I have felt despair in so many ways. But like I said, I was in the field last Saturday, and I learned something. Teachers may think of their role as trying to inspire their students, but sometimes it's the other way around. The thirty students inspired me as they discovered some new things about their world. I wasn't dragging them around; they were pulling me...

We were exploring the southern Mother Lode between the Gold Rush towns of Mariposa and Jamestown, and learned how the gold was mined, how it formed, and a bit about the environmental devastation the mining caused. We got to collect the gold ore, quartz crystals, a rare chromium mica called mariposite, and pyrite. We also had a nice view up the Merced River towards Yosemite Valley! El Capitan is the steep cliff on the left, the tip of Half Dome appears just left of center, and Clouds Rest is the snowy peak behind El Cap.

We started at the dredge tailings around Snelling and Merced Falls. To get at microscopic bits of gold that had been carried down the rivers into the Central Valley, the mining companies dug holes down to the groundwater table, forming ponds in which they floated a factory ship that dug out one end of the pond, processed the sediments for gold, and dumped the waste on the other end. They worked their way across the landscape, ripping up the topsoil and leaving behind square miles of rockpiles. The land is mostly useless now, but it provided us an opportunity to identify the kinds of rocks that occur upstream, and which reveal something of Sierran history. There was quartzite (baked and pressurized beach sands), metavolcanic greenstone, slate, and occasional fragments of marble and granite. Three quarters of the rocks found in the Sierra are various types of granitic rock, but in the Mother Lode, the more ancient and more common metamorphic rocks tell a story of ancient shorelines, terrane collisions, volcanism and other activity. These rocks are far older than the granitic intrusions.
Later in the day we explored an abandoned gold mine (just the outside, mind you) where we found the most interesting minerals, and found the famous outcrop just west of Coulterville where we could see the minerals and rocks in their original arrangement. This stretch of the Mother Lode was relatively barren of gold, so the outcrop was not mined like so many others.

It was nice to see them discussing and exploring the outcrop! That doesn't always happen.

Our day included a stop at the California State Mining and Mineral Museum in Mariposa, where a great many spectacular specimens are on display. I photograph a different group of minerals every time I visit, and somehow I concentrated on the gold this time. The leafy gold above is a piece of a larger 44 lb nugget discovered at the Harvard Open Pit Mine just before it closed down in the 1990's (the big nugget is on display at the Ironstone Winery in Murphys, a bit farther north just off of Highway 49. Below is the Fricot Nugget, weighing in at 13 lbs. It's the biggest specimen on display, and one of the largest to survive the Gold Rush era without being melted down. If you are curious, the largest single specimen ever found in the state weighed just short of 200 lbs. It got melted down, but a replica is on display in the museum.

Strangely enough, the specimen I found most interesting was one of the smallest. We tend think of gold as nuggets that have been rolled in a stream and rounded off. We don't often think of gold crystals, but there it is below. Gold crystallizes in the isometric (cubic) system, but not generally as square cubes. The specimen below looks to be more like a dodecahedron.

Across from the mine site we took a brief excursion into the Earth's mantle, which is normally found many miles below the crust, but which been pushed up to the surface along a major fault system. Most of the mantle rock (peridotite)has been altered to serpentine, but we could find some chunks of mostly unaltered mantle material.

We ended the day with stops to look at the abandoned Harvard Open Pit Mine that operated in the 1980's and 1990's, and at Table Mountain near Jamestown, a famous example of an inverted stream. I may have more to say about it next week, since our geology club is intending to climb it this weekend (in the rain, probably).

All in all it was a good day, a brief respite from sorrow, and a day of being inspired by the enthusiasm of some great students.

The Other California: The CA State Mineral Museum - this is art, darnit!

I know it when I see it. Purveyors of that which we would not call art would use shiny perfect minerals that would cause the viewer to objectify the image, and desire to possess it without appreciating or respecting the intrinsic value and quality of the mineral. I would never stoop that low just to get readership here at Geotripper. Just ignore the "xxx" and "big gold nuggets" in the blog tags. Besides, these things are in a museum. That makes this art, darnit!

And what a great museum it is! One would think that the official state mineral collection would be housed in the state capitol somewhere, or in San Francisco or Los Angeles. The collection actually was in San Francisco for many years, surviving the 1906 earthquake, but in 1983 the collection was moved to Mariposa in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode, where it resides in the California State Mining and Mineral Museum, a unit of the state park system. The choice of Mariposa makes a certain amount of historical sense, as the town hosted one of the very first hardrock mines and mills during the Gold Rush, the Mariposa, discovered by Kit Carson and ultimately owned by John C. Fremont, two of the big players in early state history.

One of the premier attractions of the collection is the Fricot nugget (that's a part of it at the top of the page), the largest single remaining nugget from the Gold Rush days, at 13.8 pounds. It sits in a vault within a vault. Most large nuggets were simply melted down (there is a larger nugget at the Ironstone Winery, but it was found in the 1990's at the Harvard Mine). There is a facsimile of the biggest nugget ever found, which originally weighed in at around 200 pounds.

The other smaller gold sample shown above is extraordinary as it shows the crystalline nature of the metal. The mineral forms octahedral crystals, but they aren't seen often because the malleable metal gets pounded into the more familiar nugget shape while being rolled in a stream. Samples like this one have to come from the quartz veins in mines.

The museum has a spectacular collection of other minerals, including some of the best specimens of our state gemstone benitoite. This exceedingly rare sapphire-like crystal is found at a single locality in the world, a serpentine outcrop in the Coast Ranges of San Benito County.

The museum has a host of other minerals on display, like the malachite sample above, and the aquamarine sample below. There are some excellent interpretive exhibits regarding the history and current state of mining in California, and even a 175 foot long tunnel that recreates a gold mine.

Admission is $4.00, but they offer discounts for school field trips (call in advance). The staff and volunteers are knowledgeable and helpful. The museum is located on Highway 49 just south of the town of Mariposa at the county fairgrounds. Unfortunately, the museum has been one of the pawns in the state budget wars, and has been threatened with closure off and on. It could use some friends in the capitol...

The Other California is part of my continuing explorations of the California that you don't always find on the postcards.