Lapidary Blog

My 14 year old son, Christopher, recently brought to my attention someone offering red horn coral, touting it as coming from only one place in the world.  While that much is certainly true enough, the one place they (repeatedly) mentioned DOESN’T EXIST!  Chris claimed that red horn coral hails from the UINTA Mountains of Utah, though they are not in the Uinta National Forest.

You can read about the forest here.   And about the mountains here.    

I checked, and sure enough, Chris was absolutely right!   The correct spelling is Uinta, which is a Ute Indian word.  NOT Unita; there’s no such place as the ‘Unita National Forest’, where the coral was said to come from, nor is there any such place as the ‘Unita Mountains’; they don’t exist, except perhaps as typographical errors, as this entry shows.

If you search Google for the misspelling Unita National Forest, the very first result is the Forest Service’s Uinta N.F. website, correctly spelled!

So, to anyone who has ever purchased or sold red horn coral, either in rough or finished form, the correct location where it was found is the Uinta Mountains, where rockhounds were once permitted to harvest specimens of red horn coral.  The area is now closed to collecting.  -grin- 

Thanks, Christo.