Octahedral, pink to rose-red fluorite crystals are historically among the most treasured and sought after of all Alpine minerals. In the European Alps the best pink fluorite specimens are found in just two small regions, in Switzerland and France, where a long and honored history of field collecting has flourished for centuries, yielding numerous important discoveries.

INTRODUCTION

The three words alone have power to conjure: "Alpine pink fluorite" evokes images of transparent pink or rose-red octahedral crystals resting on clean-looking, coarse-grained white granite, or squatting directly on mirrored faces of gemmy smoky quartz crystals. To recall or imagine such specimens is somehow to call up the exotic, the fugitive and elusive--clearly, in Alpine pink fluorite there is an otherworldliness not to be found in the fluorites, however beautiful, from Weardale or Dalnegorsk or Xianghualing or Cave-in-Rock. How about that label? Well, it will say either "Chamonix, France," perhaps with a few extra terms in French, or something Germanic, crisper and frostier, so there is nothing for it but to imagine serrated ranges of snow-capped peaks in Swiss middle distances where we will never contrive to go.

Because cleft discoveries in the high mountains typically yield very limited numbers of specimens, Alpine pink fluorite will never be common, and good specimens will never be inexpensive. But the fortunate paradox is that Alpine pink fluorite will never entirely cease showing up on the specimen market, either: the "deposits" can never realistically be "mined out." More crystallized clefts will always be there, however sparsely dispersed, awaiting discovery by Strahlers. (1)

For present purposes, Alpine pink fluorite is that which comes from the European Alps and not from "alpine-type" clefts elsewhere, although, as it happens, the earth contains only one important "alpine-type" locality outside Europe (though only just: it lies in the Polar Urals of Russia) which has produced octahedral pink fluorite crystals. Even within Europe's heartland region of rocks deformed by the (early Tertiary) Alpine Orogeny, nearly all clefts which contain pink fluorite are found within two small areas of granite and orthogneiss: (1) most of the Aare and part of the Got-thard massifs of south-central Switzerland, and (2) the Mont Blanc massif in east-central France. This review of historic occurrences of Alpine pink fluorite will be confined mostly to these two areas, with only brief descriptions of other, sparsely productive localities in Switzerland, Austria and Italy.

Also, the discussion will be restricted primarily to Alpine pink fluorite crystals, since it is almost nowhere else but in these Alpine regions that fluorite routinely forms crystals which are octahedral and pink. Of course, there have been Alpine finds of fluorite crystals in other colors: the largest octahedral crystal of fluorite ever found in a Swiss cleft is a 16-cm green octahedron encountered during construction of the Sommerloch power station during the 1950s (Weibel, 1966; Parker, 1973). But as every experienced collector knows, the real charisma belongs to the "pinks" alone.

Alpine color-zoned fluorite octahedrons occur as well. Most commonly these have pink cores and...