By DAVID FERRARA
Staff Reporter
One day, Brook Delafosse thinks maybe she’ll be a geologist or someone like the woman who digs for treasures on television.
On Saturday morning, the 9-year-old put her future to the test at the 14th annual Jewelry, Gem and Mineral Show, which concludes today, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the Greater Gulf State Fairgrounds in west Mobile.
Brook and her cousin, Lauren Luke, climbed up on a trailer bed covered in sand and dug for rocks, tossing as many as they could find within two minutes into plastic cups.
“I might think about it when I get older, digging for rocks and stuff,” she said.
Lauren proudly held up her collection. Both girls plucked out their favorite rocks, each one decidedly “shiny.”
Lauren’s mother, Amy Hamblin, said she was reminded of the Travel Channel show “Kirsten Gum: Treasure Hunter.”
“This,” Brook said, “is like the most funnest day ever.”
A few steps away, Jerry Shirey handed bags of dirt to people who sifted out various gems with running water.
“I know there are at least 10 ounces of gem-stone rough in each bag,” Shirey said of the $8 bags. “Everybody will get at least their money’s worth.”
The rocks inside had been imported from North Carolina, Brazil, India and Africa, Shirey said.
All around him, 36 dealers from as far away as India and as close as down the road in Mobile sold every type of stone imaginable.
From ancient stones to freshly cracked geodes, the hall was loaded with what Phil Kaiser, president of the Mobile Rock and Gem Society, said easily amounted to millions of dollars worth of rock. The place was filled with trays of cobaltite, trilobites, finger-like crystals and heart-shaped glass. In another spot lay an Oregon rock that collector Pete Whisenant, who hails from a small town in north Alabama called — no joke — Flat Rock, said was as “scarce as hen’s teeth,” alongside gems that purportedly shot out of Mount St. Helens. From other tables rose fossils, petrified wood and walrus tusks.
Essentially, anything hard.
And if a rock could be cut, cut it would be. One could find stones carved into guitar picks and skulls, and to name only a few of the animal variety that were spotted: Lizards, owls, dogs, cats, gators, monkeys, fish, pigs, bears, rhinos, snakes, rabbits, dolphins and dragons.
It’s a sort of Shangri-La for people Sheila Hoven of Gautier called rockhounds.
“That’s someone with a disease — the addiction to playing with rocks,” she said and directed observers to one end of her booth, where she had placed pieces of Precambrian quartz about 750 million years old.
Another certifiable rockhound, Julie Thomas, a collector from Fairhope, said she dealt in “rarity, oddity and commodity,” not just the big four (sapphires, rubies, emeralds and diamonds). She pointed to stones with strange names and expensive price tags, such as Paraiba Tourmaline and Trapiche emeralds.
Her eyes cast across thousands of square feet, and she said, “there’s so much more.”
Source: http://www.al.com/news/
