A friend and fellow mineral dealer is in town for the annual Tokyo Gem and Mineral show. On Tuesday he and suggested to me that we visit the National Museum of Nature & Science in Ueno, Tokyo. The

If you love colorful gemstones there is no better contender than tourmaline. I spent the weekend out at a mine and the following day at a collector/dealer's house "mining" some of their tourmaline

There are many a secret spot in the mountains and deserts still holding treasure, you just have to know the right people or do some serious researching to find those secret spots. A few weeks ago I found

Update - I was blogging on a mineral site about this and a guy from Australia said this may be Martite (hematite after magnetite pseudomorph). I won't know for sure until I go back to Japan and test my

A miner that I am dealing with has a ton of this material, literally. He deals in tonnage, not pounds. When I was over at his place the other week I decided to pick some up and see if I could off load

Littered with thousands of boulders, Haystack Mountain is an awesome rockhounding spot just outside of Lone Pine, CA.  The mountain sits a few hundred feet apart from the main Inyo Mountain range.

Once before, I posted a stone that I thought might be jasper but wasn't sure - it was. Today's stone is one that, for years, I thought might be a red agate. It's not - I know better now. This is red jasper.

It has always been easy for me to pick up pretty stones, but as much as I want to know what they are, I have trouble identifying them. I look at this and guess agate or jasper. If you can tell, I would

This past weekend I went to two gem shows in Southern California, the Victor Valley Gem & Mineral Society's Tailgate and The CFMS Annual Show. Both shows offer different minerals specimens which is

This is an awesome piece of citrine I picked up out in Quartzite, AZ. Citrine is a variety of quartz. The yellow to orange to red color comes from iron inclusions in the quartz. Two very common minerals

As the most abundant and widely distributed mineral on the earth's surface, of course there is quartz in my collection. I particularly like white quartz. On stoney beaches, the water tumbled white quartz

This is green copper turquoise, a bit of an oxymoron really, like jumbo shrimp or working vacation. How can turquoise be green? But we're talking about the stone and not the color so it turns out that

Life comes at you fast living in Tokyo. My wife and I were going on a date night last Saturday, but we were having a hard time deciding where to actually go in a city with more restaurants per capita than

Quartzite strikes again! I picked this beauty up while digging through a pile of amazonite.  Most of the material was all broken up, but somehow this specimen survived. It appears to have been part

Friday rocks! Thanks to @nat-expressions, who initiated the tag #fridaysrock we share pictures and information about our rocks and minerals. Feel free to join any day of the week. I have been presenting

Pentagonite Pentagonite is a rare silicate mineral sought after by collectors. While it is widely known amongst mineral collectors & dealers, it is not known to the average person. Pentagonite is an