Topaz found at Topaz Mountain Dan Mabbutt - Own Work
When I was a kid, one of the places that my dad dragged me to was Utah’s Topaz Mountain. It completely fulfilled my expectations. My dad (almost) never went anywhere nice. It seemed like there was an iron rule of rocks. The more unpleasant the place, the better the rocks! The nine circles of Dante’s Hell doesn’t have any place worse than Topaz Mountain.
Topaz Hunting Grounds in Utah Phil Konstantin - Public Domain
In spite of this, Topaz is the official Utah State Gemstone! That might be because it’s one of only two “precious” gemstones found in Utah. The other one is Red Beryl and it has been found in the Wah Wah mountains near Topaz Mountain. (I’ve always wondered if “Wah Wah” is the sound you make when you learn that you’re going to have to go there.). Red Beryl is one of the most rare gemstones in the world and the very few that have been found command prices that would make the crown price of Saudi Arabia weep.
Interesting factoid. In spite of the fact that authentic red beryl is more rare than honest politicians, every cowboy I've ever met swears that he found a piece.
It’s possible for ordinary people to actually find Utah topaz and take them home. So, it’s a lot easier to make Topaz Mountain a tourist destination.
The good news is that Topaz Mountain and the area around it is public land, open to everybody. Many Utah citizens (and Nevada, and Arizona, and Wyoming and half a dozen other states) will try to convince you that it’s government overreach for the Feds to own so much of the land. They believe that if your grandfather ran cows there, then you have a natural right to do the same. But then, everybody east of Utah – which includes a lot of people – would basically be fenced out. There! That’s my political statement. Feel free to disagree and tell me why.
Just driving out and looking for gems, however, is a tough row to hoe. It’s rough country and it’s been picked over by generations of rockhounds.
Where there’s a dollar to be made, there’s a way. Topaz Mountain Adventures offers guided tours and does the digging for you. Since the topaz crystals are found throughout cubic miles of tough volcanic rock, they helpfully dynamite apart a few tons of it every now and then so you can find those “champaigne” topaz that have been hiding from you for millions of years. All this for a very reasonable fee. Well … reasonable to them. But if you’re going to drive all the way from the east coast to find a Utah topaz, then you really should give yourself the best chance available. They have a great looking web site. You should at least check it out.
Utah topaz is very seldom larger than around a half inch due to the way they were formed in small cavities left by gas bubbles in volcanic rhyolite. These cavities are just not large enough to allow for the formation of anything bigger. The flip side of that is that there are lots of them! I can remember searching down dry sand washes at Topaz Mountain. The sand was a mass of sparkles like snowflakes in sunlight and each flash was a tiny topaz. But nearly all were about the size of snowflakes too. (But check out the “Gallery” in the page linked above to see just how great they can be.) If you think that you can win a billion dollars by buying a ticket in the lottery, then finding a big, beautiful topaz should be easy for you.
Topaz is a unique gemstone that it has a different chemistry from the gems like ruby and sapphire. The chemical composition of topaz is:
Al2(F,OH)2SiO4
For those of you for whom chemistry was just a brief nightmare you had in high school, topaz is an aluminum silicate with just a soupçon of fluorine. By contrast, ruby and sapphire are just variations on corundum – aluminum oxide – the same stuff they use to make grindstones.
When I was a kid … and in fact much later in life when I inherited my dad’s pile of topaz … I thought these beautiful crystals represented fantastical wealth. Ummmm … not quite. That’s just an example of how I really didn’t pay a lot of attention to my dad’s rocks until they became my rocks. Topaz, as it turns out, is not all that rare. And they can be pretty big, too. The largest (and third largest) faceted gemstones in the world are both topaz. The largest is the El-Dorado Topaz weighing in at 13.67 lbs.
I wondered what the “second largest faceted gemstone” was. I searched for quite a while and never did find out. You can find references to the second largest diamond, ruby and aquamarine. But not the second largest “faceted gemstone”. I think all these web pages just copy each other and that’s why nobody lists it. If you know what the second largest faceted gemstone is, leave a message! I’ll give you credit here in this blog post.
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I turned the question above into a contest at Reddit RockhoundExchange.
Two people found the same rock -- the Lua de Maraba topaz -- as the second largest faceted gemstone. I awarded both of them credit. Their Reddit screen names are:
blooblyblobl
and
toodleloomf
(Where do people get these names?????)
This means that all three of the largest faceted gemstones are topaz !!!!!
The best reference to large faceted topaz (accuracy AND PICTURES) turned out to be:
https://www.jacquelinesfinejewelry.com/blog-post/topaz-the-birthstone-for-november
But the "second largest" still seems to be the "Cinderella" of the bunch. Information about it is hard to find. And a list of the top eight topaz gemstones from one reference doesn't even include the "American Golden" (which clearly seems to be the third largest from a number of web pages) at all.
You can't believe a whole lot of things you see on the Internet !!!!
Nice! I’ve never been there but I’d still like to have a go at finding little treasures. I like the idea of having a guide.