Cripple Creek Turquoise Mine

Cripple Creak Turquoise comes from the Cripple Creek mining area, located in Teller County Colorado, near the town of Cripple Creek. This is a very hard stone with colour range from light and dark blues with brown matrix, and more rarely a golden limonite matrix to blue-green. Hardness can be up to 6 mohs. The best use over all is for inlay and cabbing, although the medium quality is often a little pithy or porous, the result of which does not become visible until the end of the polishing process. This turquoise, like Carico Lake turquoise, is found as a by product of gold mining. This stone is found as both vein material and nodules.

This history of Cripple Creek Turquoise is quite interesting. One of the last great Colorado bonanza camps, the district was first discovered in 1891 by cowboy Bob Womack and turned out to be one of the richest gold mining camps in US history. The 500 mines in the area have yielded over 600 metric tons of gold, making it the third most productive gold district in the history of the United States.

Cripple Creek is unusual in that it is one of only a few domestic Turquoise mines still active today, although production has been limited. There are currently two active turquoise mines in the area being operated by two different families. The area is also quite mineral rich; along with gold and turquoise, over 120 other mineral species have been found.