Check out the crystals in Diane's Pocket

Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News

Published November 10, 2006 at midnight

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Prospector Stephen Brancato Jr. was preparing to dig for gemstones on Mount Antero when a Windex-blue crystal of aquamarine - as thick as a Bic pen and more than an inch long - rolled down the hillside and hit him in the knee.

"It was just shining and gleaming and refracting the sun back at me," said Brancato, 35, a high school dropout who moved from Long Island to Colorado and staked a claim in 2002 on Antero's south flank, in the Sawatch Range of central Colorado.

That hexagonal crystal, which rolled into Brancato's life in July 2004, led to the discovery of the largest aquamarine specimen ever found in North America. The reconstructed Diane's Pocket specimen, named for Brancato's mother, glistens and bristles with more than 100 aquamarine crystals, as well as other gems.

It was donated to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and will go on permanent public display there Nov. 17.

Aquamarine is a variety of the mineral beryl that is valued as a gemstone. In fact, it's the official state gemstone of Colorado, and the summit of Mount Antero is a well-known source. Aquamarines have a hexagonal crystal structure and are closely related to emeralds.

The three days following Brancato's discovery were a feverish blur of sledgehammers and pickaxes.

Within an hour, he opened a surface cavity as large as a manhole cover. Gradually, he followed the trail of crystals, excavating a tube-shaped hole 6 feet beneath the surface.

"It didn't stop spitting crystals for three days," Brancato said Thursday. "I was burning out batteries on my head lamp. I was cold, but I didn't know it, and my fingers were bleeding, but I didn't care.

"Those were the most intense days of my life, for sure," he said. "I'm surprised my heart didn't explode from the rush."

It took a couple of weeks to haul 1,000 pounds of crystal-containing dirt and clay down the mountain in backpacks to Brancato's ATV.

The prospector, who lives east of Salida in the town of Howard, later contacted Bryan Lees, president of Collector's Edge Minerals Inc. in Golden. He told Lees he wanted to reconstruct the crystals as they would have appeared when they formed on the walls of the underground chamber millions of years ago.

The reconstructed specimen would then be donated to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Brancato insisted.

To make Brancato's dream a reality, Lees persuaded Bruce Oreck, a Denver Museum of Nature & Science trustee and an avid mineral collector, to buy the Diane's Pocket specimen and donate it.

Brancato said he earned "somewhere in the low six figures" from the deal, which allowed him to establish his Howard-based company, Bona Fide Mining Inc.

The money also paid for the painstaking cleaning and reconstruction project, which took about a year, Lees said.

Epoxy was used to glue the crystals to the slabs of feldspar rock from the chamber walls. The finished product measures 37 inches by 25 inches and weighs about 100 pounds.

"The museum really has an Earth treasure," he said. "It will draw audiences for as long as the museum is there."

If you go

Diane's Pocket, which glistens with more than 100 aquamarine crystals, will go on permanent display in the Coors Gem and Mineral Hall at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd., on Nov. 17.

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