Dry Creek is the rarest turquoise on this site, and the strangest looking. It comes from a small mine in the Battle Mountain area of Nevada, on Shoshone land, and the stone is so pale it can read as off-white or the faintest powder blue, laced with a soft tan to grey matrix.
The reason for the colour is worth understanding, because it is what makes the stone interesting rather than defective. Turquoise gets its blue from copper. The ground at Dry Creek had very little copper in it, so the turquoise that formed there came out almost colourless. It is chemically the real thing — genuine turquoise, not a substitute and not bleached — it simply never had the copper to turn blue.
This is where buyers get confused, so it is worth being direct: Dry Creek is sometimes marketed as white buffalo turquoise, and it is a different material from the white buffalo we sell. White buffalo is a bright white stone with hard black webbing. Dry Creek is pale blue-white turquoise with soft, muted matrix. Side by side they are not difficult to tell apart, and the Turquoise Guide goes into how.
How to judge it: look for a clean creamy-to-pale-blue field without grey muddiness, and a matrix that stays soft and diffuse rather than reading as dirt. The mine has produced very little, so genuine Dry Creek is scarce and pieces are generally small — rings, pendants and earrings rather than big cuffs.
We currently list 15 Dry Creek pieces, handmade with natural stones in sterling silver. Because there are so few, sold pieces stay listed — call (480) 949-1101 and we will tell you what is actually on the floor. See also Royston and the full turquoise collection. Old Town Scottsdale since 1979.