The February 2025 Mineralogy Study Group Meeting was held on February 22nd, 2025. Our speaker was Dan Kile. His topic was "Thunder Bay Amethyst".
Dan Kile has been an ardent field collector of minerals (along with his wife, Dianne) for nearly 54 years, mostly in Colorado. In addition to field collecting activities, he has taught optical mineralogy for more than 25 years at several venues, including the Colorado School of Mines, the Hooke College of Applied Sciences (Chicago), and the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver. He is a coauthor of numerous articles pertaining to environmental and mineralogical sciences, as well as author of a monograph on the Petrographic Microscope published by the Mineralogical Record; he was additionally a co-author of the update to Ed Eckels' Minerals of Colorado. His articles in Rocks and Minerals magazine include those on Thunder Bay Amethyst (1984), Colorado quartz (1991), Del Norte thunder eggs (2002), Utah geodes (2015) and Mineralogy of the Amethyst Mines in the Thunder Bay Area (2019). He is retired from the U.S. Geological Survey, where his last position as a research geochemist entailed studies on crystal growth mechanisms and the mineralogy of clay minerals.
