Stand on Your Head #1 Claim, Ouachita National Forest, Saline County, Arkansas
2 x 1.2 x .3 inches
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Cookeite is normally a pretty boring species, however for a very brief time this goofy-named locale produced what is no doubt the world’s finest cookeite. Although there were a small number of low quality specimens that were produced that one can find on rare occasion, the high quality specimens from this locale are few and far between. The following is an excerpt from The Mineralogical Record vol.17-2:

Cookeite is not normally found as attractive specimens, but Jimmy McNeil reports an exceptional occurrence found recently at the Stand On Your Head #1 claim, in the Ouachita National Forest, Saline County, Arkansas. The cookeite occurs as individual spherules and botryoidal groups, with spherules ranging in size from 1 to 7mm. The spherules have a pleasant translucent frosty aspect and reveal their micacerous nature only when broken. The interesting thing about these specimens is the color: pale green to dark blue, in some cases resembling chrysocolla or other botryoidal copper minerals. Coloress quartz crystals of the typical Arkansas type are commonly associated, along with a little rectorite (X-ray and chemical identifications courtesy of the Smithsonian Institurion).
The cookeite is found in outcrops of solution quartz veins cutting sandstone. Several cabinet specimens, perhaps 25 minatures, and 100 tumbnails of good to high quality have been recovered.

This specimen is undoubtedly one of the top of those “perhaps 25 miniatures” that the article mentions. This super high-quality miniature is better than any other Stand-on-Your-Head blue cookeite that I have seen. This specimen has a well-balanced and magnificently aesthetic distribution of blue cookeite crystals on a matrix of small glassy, gemmy, water-clear quartz points. The cookeite has a wondrous, glowing translucence that shows a faint patchwork-like pattern inside the crystals. The blue color is unlike any other in the mineral kingdom, it is a very rich, saturated blue with a hint of green.