Article by Steve Voynick
Mountains – August 1996 – Colorado Central Magazine
Most of us climb 14ers for reasons that are, at best, abstract. All we bring back are memories, feelings of accomplishment and, for those of us approaching middle age, the comforting reassurance that we can still do it.
Rosy O’Donnell of Poncha Springs climbs 14ers for a more pragmatic reason. Actually, Rosy climbs only one 14er — Mt. Antero. Although he’s climbed Antero more than 200 times, he rarely makes it to the summit, stopping instead to prowl around the 13,000-foot level. He may not come away with a peak bagger’s sense of summit satisfaction, but he doesn’t come back empty-handed, either.
When Rosy O’Donnell descends the little-traveled, rocky trails of Antero’s steep eastern slope, his pack, more often than not, is filled with crystals of aquamarine, goshenite, phenakite, smoky quartz, and fluorite. Many of the crystals are gem quality, and their delightful color, clarity, and crystalline symmetry are the envy of both New Age meditators and technically oriented mineral collectors.
During 18 years of climbing Antero, Rosy estimates he’s brought back 50 pounds of aquamarine and goshenite crystals, two tons of smoky quartz crystals and quartz-on-matrix, and a half-ton of one-inch, green fluorite crystals.
In 1994, Rosy found a spectacular, 100-pound matrix specimen bearing several foot-long, four-inch-thick, gem quality, smoky quartz crystals. Getting it down from the roadless, high eastern shoulder of Antero took a bit of innovation. Using aspen branches and twine, Rosy lashed two aspen trunks and a wheelbarrow wheel together into a crude travois. With the help of his son, Keith, and a friend, he slowly hauled the big specimen over seven miles of rough trail and down a 4,000-vertical-foot descent to his pickup truck.
A month later, Rosy displayed the specimen at the Denver Gem & Mineral Show. Going against top specimens from around the world, Rosy’s big Antero “smokier” took a blue ribbon.
There are really two parts to this story. The first is Rosy O’Donnell, who put in another summer of crystal collecting on Mt. Antero in 1995 — after celebrating his 75th birthday in March.
The second is Mt. Antero itself. Antero stands 14,256 feet high amid the peaks of the southern Sawatch Range. It’s one of the impressive line of 14ers — Princeton, Antero, and Shavano — that rise just west of U.S. 285 between Buena Vista and Salida.
Like many Colorado 14ers, Antero is composed of common granite, consisting essentially of quartz, feldspar, and mica. But Antero is also mineralogically unique, for the uppermost 1,500 feet of its granite is laced with pegmatites that make the mountain one of North America’s classic crystal collecting localities.
To make a long mineralogical story short, fine-grained common granite forms when granitic magma solidifies relatively quickly. But the Antero pegmatites, which are bodies of very coarse-grained granite, formed when remnant bodies of granitic magma, enriched with unusual and rare earth minerals, retained heat to solidify very slowly.
Mariolitic (gas) cavities within the solidifying magma provided the necessary space for the growth of large and often spectacular crystals.
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Millions of years of weathering and erosion have since exposed the crystal-filled pegmatite cavities below Antero’s summit. The cavities, which collectors call “pockets,” are filled with clay and usually covered with talus, soil, or alpine tundra growth. It’s not difficult to collect scattered, abraded crystal fragments on Antero, but finding quality material takes time, effort, know-how, and a bit of luck.
Crystal collecting on Mt. Antero is a 115-year-old tradition that began in 1881, when Nelson Wanamaker of Salida began collecting and selling the crystals locally. When Wanamaker first climbed Antero, the surface was littered with fine crystals. In his earliest collecting expeditions, Wanamaker simply roamed about the talus slopes picking up crystals lying in plain sight.
Once the easy pickings were gone, Wanamaker learned that collecting near Antero’s summit, because of inaccessibility, extreme elevation, and the short collecting season, was no easy job. Nevertheless, the crystals were valuable and Wanamaker collected them for ten summers.
First, he erected a base cabin at the 9,500-foot level. Then he built a crude stone shelter only 700 feet below the summit, enabling him to spend nights at the pegmatites to maximize collecting time. The stone shelter also afforded some protection from sudden summit storms.
Wanamaker’s most valuable and beautiful recoveries were aquamarine, the blue and blue-green variety of the mineral beryl (emerald is the green variety), which gem experts equated with the world’s best. By 1890, Colorado lapidaries had cut $5,000 worth of finished aquamarine gems, some as large as 12 carats. Wanamaker, who worked alone, may have collected as much as $10,000 worth of Antero gemstones and specimen crystals–no small piece of change in the 1880s.
During the 1930s, Edwin Over and Arthur Montgomery, both expert collectors, worked the Antero pegmatites.
Montgomery, a University of Pennsylvania geology professor and an accomplished field prospector, kept accounts of his four summers on Antero. Here, Montgomery describes the opening of an aquamarine pocket:
… The pocket opened out of a small seam of pegmatite in a vertical cliff face. A small pocket, it ran almost entirely to aquamarine, yielding more than 200 crystals altogether. Over fairly raked out the crystals when he got into the richest part…. One specimen was wholly unique. Have you ever seen a cluster of six or seven aquamarine, with individual terminations merging together near the base into a lovely mass of the richest blue colors? It was an exquisite fan-shaped delicacy from another world.
Any climber can tell you that spending entire days just below the summit of a 14,000-foot mountain like Antero can involve a bit of risk. Montgomery described one such example — a lightning storm in August, 1937:
A tremendous array of black clouds was coming out of the west…. Suddenly I began to hear a faint humming in the air, something like a giant dynamo in the distance. I threw down the tools, grabbed my pack, and made for the edge of the ridge; I knew the signs. Without warning my hair began to sizzle and buzz inside my hat like a swarm of bees. The small prospector’s pick in my hand was now whining like a live thing and I chucked it from me as I went over the edge at top speed.
The sky was now like pitch overhead, almost a blue black. Streamers of mist, dead-white against the dark background swarmed around and passed the point of the east ridge and cut it off from view. A livid flame of lightning etched itself against the clouds and the terrific explosion of thunder was practically simultaneous…. The lightning began to play along the tops of the ridges with a furious intensity … the noise of the hailstones, as large as mothballs, sounded with a swishing and rapid fire drumming on the rocks. In a moment or two everything was white.
Electrical storms still routinely light up Antero’s summit, but the mountain today is no longer quite as inaccessible or lonely. A rough four-wheel-drive road now ascends the west shoulder of Antero almost to the summit. And with the site widely publicized in mineralogical circles, more hopeful crystal collectors than ever now visit Antero.
Each summer, hundreds of collectors drive their four-wheelers nearly to the summit to search casually for loose crystals amid the talus. A lesser number actually do some light digging in hopes of uncovering a pegmatite pocket. But very few collectors go at it seriously.
Among these modern day Wanamakers and Montgomerys, Rosy O’Donnell is one of the most determined and successful. O’Donnell doesn’t bother to claim the pegmatite cavities he finds, simply because no one else has ever found them. “I leave my tools and other gear up there all the time and never have any trouble,” Rosy says, “Lots of folks drive up the jeep road, park — if they can find a place to park — and search nearby. But very few have the know-how or the stamina to search the rougher, more dangerous terrain.”
The pegmatite area covers well over one square mile of the eastern slopes below the summits of Mt. Antero and adjacent Mt. White, which are connected by a high saddle.
After 115 years of collecting, crystals and gemstones no longer litter the surface. So how many crystals are actually left to find?
“Most folks make a trip or two, don’t find anything, and figure there’s nothing left,” Rosy says. “But I think there are more crystals still waiting up there than have ever been collected. Finding them isn’t easy, because it takes lots of time and effort. And you always have to climb that mountain. But the climbing is easier when you have a good reason to do it.”
Antero’s pegmatites would have had a different fate had they been located not high on a 14er, but, say, just off the shoulder of U.S. 24. “The pegmatites would have been far more heavily collected, maybe even commercially mined.” Rosy says. “But it’s better this way, because mineral collecting will go on up there for a long time to come.”
So if you ever feel like trying a 14er where you can come back with more than memories and a sense of summit satisfaction, think about Antero. As Rosy O’Donnell says, the climbing is easier when you have a good reason to do it.
Ever since he moved to live within sight of Mt. Elbert, Steve Voynick has been looking for a better reason than “because it’s there” to climb a mountain. His history of the Climax Molybdenum Mine, published by Mountain Press, should appear any day now. It was in the publisher’s fall catalogue, but at press time, no one here had actually seen a book.
