Sleeping Beauty Turquoise

Driving into Globe, Arizona is still a unique experience. The road curves in and around the hills, sometimes cutting through the rocks before opening up to overlook the town. It used to be a major stop along the US-60 heading out from phoenix to the eastern part of Arizona because the next large town was many miles away. The copper mining is still huge here and BHP copper dominates the landscape. They currently don't mine the turquoise and sadly, it is treated no differently than copper ore and gets smelted. This seems absurd and it is hard to understand how they can take a mineral of such value and just destroy it for its copper content. There are several reasons the Turquoise extraction has stopped but it all starts with a breakdown in the long time deal the Sleeping Beauty Company had with the copper mine. The negotiations probably broke down over money. The copper mine used to have to set aside Turquoise rich material and call in the Turquoise miners to remove the material. This halted copper production and created safety and liability concerns for the mine. The Turquoise miners removed the material themselves and did a lot of it by hand but surely they had loaders and excavators involved as well. Sometime about 5 years ago now, the company running the copper mine changed ownership and they made the decision not to continue with Turquoise extraction. Since then, the Sleeping Beauty Turquoise store in Globe closed down and supplies of their Turquoise have diminished while prices have increased for the remaining material.

The old Sleeping Turquoise Store was mostly a jewelry store and the selection of turquoise offered in the store was modest, the material offered to the public was in small quantities and smaller sizes. There were several small bins with high quality natural nuggets just tumbled and polished in their natural nugget forms. They also had cabochons cut and backed in a couple different styles, ready for jewelry. There were also a few rare, larger specimens, under a showcase. The majority of what the mine produced was offered to buyers and re-sellers through a waiting list system as it became available. The huge worldwide demand for Sleeping Beauty made it difficult for the mine to keep up and the turquoise was often presold before it was even mined. Jeweler's and artists would compete to buy up as much of the quality material as they could while it was available. Some built up stockpiles of the mineral and are only now, in 2019, just starting to run low.

Why does Sleeping Beauty Turquoise sometimes have black spots?