THE GARNET FAMILY

Spanning the Spectrum of Mineralogy

- BOB JONES

Garnets are among the most common crystallized minerals you can collect. It is one of the very few minerals that spans the entire spectrum of mineralogy. It has been used as a gem for thousands of years. It has always been popular as a collector mineral. It is useful in the industrial world, and scientists study some garnets to determine the pressures and temperatures that create metamorphic rocks located many kilometers deep in the earth. Several varieties of garnets are delightfully beautiful and exotic, while others are common and easy to identify when you are field collecting.

It may seem odd to associate garnets with the business world, but one little-known fact concerns the world-famous Wrangell, Alaska, garnets. They played an important role in cracking what the business world calls the “glass ceiling.”

Near the mouth of the Stikine River, close by Wrangell, Alaska, is Garnet Ledge, one of the better-known almandine garnet deposits. Specimens from here have been collected for over a century, starting with gold prospectors, once owned by the Boy Scouts, and Juneau’s Presbyterian Church, and now it is a registered Wilderness area held in trust for the children of Alaska.