Famous Mineral Localities: The Erupcion/Ahumada Mine: Los Lamentos District Chihuahua, Mexico

Villa Ahumada is a disorderly line of adobe shacks that hugs the narrow highway. Although there are no mines there, the town sometimes serves as a distribution point for the mineral wealth of the Los Lamentos District. For the most part, that wealth takes the form of bright orange or yellow crystals of wulfenite. We arrived in town at noon and immediately enquired about the availability of mineral specimens. Although we worked diligently, we were able to uncover only one lead-a man named Garcia, who ran a butcher shop. We paid him a visit and asked about wulfenite. Senor Garcia reached under the counter and produced two excellent specimens. One was a piece of white limestone 3.5 inches long, liberally sprinkled with splendent yellow crystals of wulfenite. The other was a hollow dome of intergrown crystals of a deep orange color.

Private collectors and dealers from the United States have also attempted to work the property for wulfenite. El Paso mineral dealer Manuel Ontiveros (now 82 years old) originally purchased specimens from various independent miners beginning around 1954, and later had an arrangement with the mine management to allow his hired miners in to collect specimens; they took out a particularly fine batch of specimens for him around 1972. And another El Paso dealer, Jack Young, hired an Indian miner who in 1976 took out an interesting pocket of wulfenite specimens showing elongated pseudocubic crystals and also some extremely fine, large, gemmy red-orange crystals.

Mineral dealer Benny Fenn (now in Las Cruces) spent time at Los Lamentos in 1969-1970, personally collecting approximately 2,000 pounds (about 400 flats) of good wulfenite specimens from an extensive series of pockets. "For several months the floor of my barn on Colonia Juarez was totally covered with the most fantastic wulfenite you could imagine," said Benny (Panczner, 1984). This may be the same batch that Wayne Thompson remembers seeing at the home of Tucson mineral dealer Suzie Davis around 1970; he said that specimens covered 80% of her front yard, from the street to her house.

Around 1974 a batch of specimens emerged in which the wulfenite crystals are thick and large (up to 3 × 4 × 4 cm), and intergrown in heavy clusters to 12 or 15 cm across, without matrix. The last major pocket of wulfenite found was recovered by Tacho Solis in 1979. It yielded a small but especially attractive lot of specimens (Wilson, 1980a) from level 7, consisting of very lustrous and platy, semi-transparent crystals forming solid crusts with no matrix.

In fact, there have been so many good pockets collected over the years that it would be very difficult to build a record of them all. Los Lamentos was a very productive place for mineral specimens, especially during the times when mining for "ore" was active, because in later decades this mining took place entirely in the wulfenite zone, where wulfenite and vanadinite were the main ore minerals. Many tens of thousands of specimens reached the collector market.