I live Ouray County on the Western Slope in the San Juan Mountains and occasionally there are rare finds of Telluride Gold out here. I have spent alot of time prospecting out here and have never seen what it actually looks like until I started working in Alaska. Currently where I work, we have found Cavalerite, or more specific Hessite and Petzite. And after seeing it in person, makes me wonder how many times I may have actually seen it in the field and just thought it was Galena and tossed it to the side. I wanted to share some pictures and thoughts on the ways I have learned how to identify Telluride Golds in the field.
To me personally, it can easily be misidentified for Galena. TeAu is nearly is the same color as Galena but has a brighter more brilliant luster than the lead/steel gray color of Galena. Another is the hardness, if you have a pocket knife and a specimen large enough to scratch, handlens can help, the TeAu will behave like typical gold and be malleable, kinda like butter. Where as if it was Galena, it was fracture and break into smaller cubes/fragments. Another tricky thing with TeAu is that it does have what I would call a pseudo crystal structure, the best way I can describe it is that it imitates Pyrite/Galena, it may look like it has a crystal structure or striations on the faces when its euhedral, but scratching it would tell you if its gold or not (although that would ruin the beautiful crystals, just a trade off to be able to identify it IMO). This is just a few tricks I learned in identifying in the field in whole rock. If you were panning, it would behave just like yellow gold but would almost look like platinum instead.
There have been nice specimens found in Colorado, I can spot yellow gold very easily now but just learning about the white golds.