Being In California Means Gem & Mineral Hunting!
Hunting Gems & Minerals At Searchers' Gem Show
One nice thing about being back in California is I have a lot of free time to go out gem & mineral hunting! This weekend happened to be my old gem & mineral club's annual show. So I stopped by today to see what goodies I could I could "dig up".
The name of my old club is Searchers. Based in Anaheim, they've been doing the show annually for over 50 years! The show is a nice blend of collectors and dealers. That gives you some great high end pieces as well as rough, unpolished or cut minerals. It was nice to see some old friends as well as some new ones.
I went there looking for red beryl and benitoite, but unfortunately those two minerals are getting harder to find, which means the prices have been driven up. The few specimens I found were very expensive and so I looked for other minerals to bring back to Japan.
Turquoise is always a good mineral for the Japanese market. Luckily this show had a lot of good material from different vendors.
One vendor we purchase from regularly every year at Gem-O-Rama in Trona was there. He and his wife had a lot of new material from several different mines, like the Blue Moon mine & Broken Arrow mine. Both mines have unique properties that set them apart. The Blue Moon is a nice blue color in a gray & black host rock giving it a striking contrast. The Broken Arrow is a vibrant green color that sometimes includes variscite, another green mineral.
In between stocking up on turquoise I found a vendor who is an active collector and always has interesting specimens. I was able to pick up some fluorite with galena cubes and a mineral called Kernite with realgar inclusions. One kernite specimen was pretty stunning so I grabbed it.
Kernite
Fluorite & Galena
Lastly I found a nice piece of Mexican Jelly Opal. That ended day of my hunting. It wasn't a big haul, but I wasn't too concerned because the much larger West Coast Gem & Mineral show is coming up in two weeks! A benitoite vendor who somewhat mentored me will be there so I'll be able to pick up some great specimens from him.
Until next time, thanks for reading!
Mineral Mondays will be back this week with some new opals I just dug out of the Mojave Desert last weekend!
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This post has received a 3.16 % upvote from @boomerang.
Extremely wonderful rawks!!!
Nice haul, wish we were there :-))
Was just talking about when we'd
see your mineral Monday earlier
today with the hubby lol
💎 💎 💎
Thanks @shasta and thank you for the resteeem.
The specimens are much nicer in person. My wife always tells me I take awful pictures of minerals. In addition the fluorite needs to be cleaned. Hopefully they will look a little nicer once that is done.
You are most welcome 🌄
It's not easy for me to get a clear
closeup most the time and other
times there are so many the mind
goes wild lol
Use to hit up a lot of rock and gem
shows in northern California years ago.
I look forward to more rawks@rt395!
Also I just seen some fossils on @elohibaluk!
yeow! resteemed also :-)
Find any gold?
I'm sure there is some left somewhere in California.
Geologists have speculated there is still 2/3 of the gold left in the mountains, hills and deserts. I've found some before sluicing and dry washing, but I have more fun hunting gems & minerals than gold these days. @derekrichardson has pull some nice nuggets out of the San Gabriel Mountains though.
As far as there being gold at the show, there were some nice specimens from John Garsow. They always have great specimens.