Tucson

We arrived at the Tucson Jewelry, Mineral, Gem and Fossil Show, the largest of its kind in the world.  There are more than 40 individual venues, similar to this tent, with thousands of dealers from all over the world.  This is where you shop ’til you drop.  This is our second year and we have made it to less than half of the venues.

There is a wide array of fossils available here sourced from the Green River area of WY to Mongolia.  There are complete Sabre Tooth tigers, Wooly Mammoths, a myriad of sea creatures, turtles, and dozens of perfectly preserved Wooly Mammoth tusks from Mongolia and Alaska.

This is a fossil of a Romanian cave bear.

I don’t really know what this is but it looks gruesome.

A 95% complete T-Rex skull can be had for $430,000.

It is pretty cool if you have the room.

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Another neat fossil.

These are lamps and wall hangings made from sheets of rock that have been sliced and polished.  This particular dealer was from Jackson, WY.

There were lots of framed fossils of sea life.  Cathy is standing by one to show its size.  We could not fit this in our Motor home.

This is Dhondup Dighng from Tibet.  We met last year and I visited his booth this year to pick up some prayer flags (shown in the background).  He gave us a website to a Tibet news source that gives the local news unfiltered.  There are horrible atrocities that are largely unreported going on in that region, mostly by the ChiComs.

How about a tray of cut emeralds? There were also rubies, sapphires, and every gem known, in these mass quantities.

For example, one dealer brought 100 tons of Rhodochrosite, 20 tons of Fluorite, 15 tons of Chrysocolla, 85 tons of Calcite, 40 tons of Malachite and 20 tons of Lapis Lazuli to the show. Just one dealer!  Some of the Chinese dealers we visited had multiple tons of material. We saw individual crystals ranging from $1 to $25,000.

These lizards would fit in the coach, but we could not afford it on this trip.

We met the Alaskan outdoorsman Miles Martin.  He has written eight books on his adventures in the north.  We spent a good deal of time talking, he has lived in many of the places we visited on our recent trip.  Martin is truly a character, with great stories. We picked up a couple of his books.  There were also several other Alaskans in adjacent booths.

This is an example of a large amethyst geode.  Believe it or not, this was not the largest example at the show.  The forklift in the back is to move it.

Here is Cathy wandering the aisles looking for something “special”

If Gems, Minerals and Fossils were not enough, one dealer from Egypt had glassware dating from BC!   Check out these Viking artifacts:

Anther Sabre Tooth cat:

We met one dealer from Volcano, CA.  I told him we were very familiar with Volcano and he was surprised.  We used to visit Daffodil Hill on a yearly bases (which is three miles from Volcano) to see the mass of daffodils that have been there for almost 100 years.

I did manage to pick up an example of K-2 Nite from Amir Mirza, a dealer from Pakistan. It is granite based with blue azurite dots and is unique to K2 in Pakistan.  We talked for a while about how the minerals from Iran are being found in the US.  It seems that it takes a transporter with dual citizenship to move the material from Iran into Pakistan where it is then loaded for transport to the US.  We have met a lot of interesting people at this show.