Midnight Owl Fieldtrip

Thank You for This Honor!
By Les Presmyk
(Ed. Note: The A.L. Flagg Distinguished Service Award was not given 2002, due to an over sight by the award
committee and the Foundation officers. The 2002 and 2003 awards were presented at this year's symposium.  Les Presmyk received the 2002 award and Anna Domitrovic was given the 2003 award. See the form in this newsletter for nominations for the 2004 award.)

Imagine my surprise when my name got called up to accept the A.L. Flagg Distinguished Service Award.  I had just entered the same group as Marc Watson, Ben Benham, and Ray Grant. I still go into my office to make sure the Trophy is really there.

Almost forty years ago Marc Watson took Wayne Thompson and me to our first Mineralogical Society of Arizona meeting.  That night I had my first opportunity to view and enjoy the minerals on display in the museum, but more importantly, the Woolery collection. In those early days, we weren't quite sure who A.L. Flagg was, just that some adults thought enough of him to start a Foundation and acquire a mineral collection. But what a mineral collection!

The cases that housed the Woolery collection covered almost three walls of the room where the MSA met. When the collection was put on display, there was not enough room to place labels on all of the specimens in the cases. Instead,  numbers were placed in front of each specimen, and a notebook was hanging next to each case. All you had to do was look at a specimen, note the number, and then look it up to see what it was or where it was from.
Wayne and I spent hours going through the cases. There was the azurite case where we could compare specimens from France and Tsumeb and Arizona, or the wulfenite case where we could study the nuances of the three dozen Defiance wulfenites. The labeling system was especially nice because it taught us a great deal about sight identification and developing a memory for localities. Some days we would go from case to case identifying minerals or localities and other days we would give each other the opportunity to take our first choice or two choices or whatever number we felt appropriate.

Besides the mineral collection, there were people

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somewhat skeptical, it doesn't look like mica, it is not platy, but almost sectile, and very carveable.  Anyway, I found a specimen that has a crystal of the waxy mineral in a crystal of  lepidolite, and it appears to be prismatic and hexagonal, adding evidence to believe it is mica after all, just in a very different form than we usually see.
The wildflowers were in bloom, and they were gorgeous!  We saw several species I recognized, Lupine and California Poppies, but there were several I had to look up when I got home.  I collected many pictures of these colorful blossoms.
All day long the weather was perfect for this type of outing, and as we were driving out on the rough road to our vehicles it began to sprinkle.  The desert air smells so fine when it rains!  What a perfect ending to an interesting day of collecting!

New member Nancy Ratcliff joins Mardy, Jay, Neil, and Ray on the Montebraisite pile.

Eucryptite glows raspberry red under SW UV.

Pegmatites cut the landscape.

Colorful flowers covered the hills.

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