Dwarves' Earth Treasures Online
Museum:
Datolites of St. Louis
Mine
St. Louis Mine, Calumet,
Houghton Co., Michigan
Status: Now a private property (as of Aug 2019)
The Red Metal Retreat book on the
minerals and mine dumps mentioned that there are some agates
at St. Louis Mine so we went there to investigate. Yep, there
are some pink to purple agates all over but mostly really
small and larger ones are usually fractured. I stumbled
into a datolite fragment when it was raining and that was an
unexpected find. The rain brought its green color out that
would have gone unnoticed when dry. So next year, I came back
to the same place and poked at the rocks and one large
datolite just rolled out. After that, I did some digging and
found some more datolites. Turned out that they're grayish to
green with so much copper specks all over and some are
orangish due to iron straining (they're porous). They
may be not pretty datolites but they're quite cool. :)
You can click on the pictures to
see larger pictures.
The 2nd Largest datolite
I have found so far
Glazed to bring out its green color.
Quite soft and porous
Gray-black color
due to tarnished copper
Orange color due to iron
staining
My first whole datolite that
rolled
out when I poked at the rocks