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Is Bisbee Turquoise very
rare? - Yes, Bisbee Turquoise is very rare as it was
never mined, it was a by product when they were mining for copper. There
were also many other beautiful minerals that came out of the mine that they
ran into while mining for copper. They ran into the main pockets of Bisbee
Turquoise in the late 1950's until the early 1960's and moved it to a dump.
Employee's and thieves rummaged through the dumps to get all of the Bisbee
Turquoise that ever made it to the market.
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Did Bisbee produce green
Turquoise? - Yes, it produced beautiful green Turquoise,
you can find some examples in our slide show.
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Did Bisbee produce spiderweb
Turquoise - Yes, some of the most beautiful spiderwebbed
Turquoise in the world came from the Bisbee mine. There are many examples
in our slide shows.
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Is all Bisbee Turquoise high-grade?
- No, the majority of Bisbee Turuqoise you find for
sale these days is found in the old collectors trash rock buckets. Most
people can not tell good Turquoise from bad when it is in the rough, Bisbee
Turquoise collectors love to find these people to sell their trash to.
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Is there ever black matrix
in Bisbee Turquoise? - No, that would be real rarity!
The host rock within the entire region is brown, chocolate brown and redish
brown.
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Are they still mining Bisbee
Turquoise? No, they never did mine for Turquoise,
they just ran into it while mining for copper. Recently, they burried the
tailings with over 50 feet of dirt so nobody and ever get to the dumps again
due to liabilities.
- Will they ever re-open the Bisbee Turquoise
mine? - No, not unless someone comes up with a major
amount of up front money, expensive equipment and willing to pay an outragious
amount for insurance. Even at that, they probibly never find enough high-grade
Turquoise to pay for time.
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Is there fake Bisbee Turquoise?
Yes, if you do not know the charicteristics of Bisbee
Turquoise you could be fooled. There is one particular type of Turquoise
from China called Red Skin, it has been altered to look like Bisbee Turquoise
but it does not look like real Bisbee Turquoise if you know what your looking
at.
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Is there treated/stabilized
Bisbee Turquoise? Yes, Bob Mathews and Cecil Mickelson
were trying to stabilize Turquoise in the 1960's. They were not very good
at it though, they used regular boat resin to soak it in. When we purchased
the Cecil Mickelson Bisbee Turquoise collection we found blocks of resin
with Bisbee Turqoise in them. Is was like they loaded a milk carton with
turquoise, filled it full of resin and then let it set up. We used acetone
to break it up and the harder Turquoise was never penitrated, the once chaulky
Turquoise did get penitrated but is really ugly.
