Hunting Gems & Minerals At Searchers' Gem Show

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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".

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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.

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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.

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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

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Fluorite & Galena

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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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