Among the most rare garnets in the USA are these sparkling, gemmy, amber-orange-brown crystals with immediately recognizable color, from the remote mountaintops of the Cascades. Field collecting them is extremely difficult and good specimens are seldom seen. This is a well-trimmed, display quality small cabinet piece, that was collected 20 years or more ago by John Lindell, one of the most well known of the collectors of this region of the USA. He traded it in 1998 to Hans-Jurgen Wilke, in whose collection it remained until the sale of his collection in 2014. It has crystals to 1 cm, most of them quite gemmy, and only minimal damage (more acceptable in these rarities than they might be from other more easy-to-get localities). The specimen just leaps out on a shelf and is certainly among the better examples of tis size range, I have seen on the market. So far as I know, nothing really good has come out of here in decades and this remains a legendary, hard to collect, US locality.

Note the truly unique nature of the Vesper Peak garnets which is that some of them have certain crystal faces that form “squares.” I am not sure if the position of the different faces are such that they define a cube or not but I do not know of any other garnet locality that exhibits these unusual crystals. Not all Vesper Peak garnets show this unusual crystal form but IF you see it, odds are the piece is from Vesper Peak. (see R&M Vol. 66, no 4 – WASHINGTON state issue)

In the final picture, I have circled some of the more obvious square faces on the crystals.