Nevada Turquoise is known in the Turquoise trading world as being generally of good quality, tougher than Turquoise from many other sources, and able to take a good polish. Turquoise, in fact, is not all that common a mineral, world-wide, for it not only requires the presence of three particular chemicals, it also needs voids in rocks, where it can form, which must be brought about by particular geological upheavals, and on top of that the area must be arid, for too much water flowing about will wash away the solution before it can form and solidify. In the centre of Nevada among the mountain ranges wandering more or less north to south through the Great Basin Desert, the conditions are right.
However, though Turquoise has been mined in Nevada commercially since the 1870s, and was for a long time, and probably still is, the biggest element in the North American Turquoise trade, demand outstrips supply; conditions are hard, the terrain is hard, and the entire Turquoise mining business of Nevada is basically small mine operations. Limited supply keeps the price of Nevada Turquoise high in the ranks of American Turquoise, and certainly considerably higher than any Turquoise produced in China or Tibet, where the cost of labour is considerably less than in the middle of Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.