This past weekend was the West Coast Gem and Mineral Show in Santa Ana, California. It's a good sized show for all types of mineral collectors and dealers. One of my good friends was exhibiting so I went to hang out with him and his girlfriend as well as pick up some new mineral specimens like this 8.4lb monster fluorite.
The specimen came from a mine in England called Greenlaws Mine in Daddry Shield, https://www.mindat.org/loc-5152.html . Because it's such a large piece I thought about the journey it had taken from a mine in the North of England all the way to Southern California and into my hands. I'm thinking about holding on to it rather than selling it even though I could make a large 10x profit off it. Time will tell.
The show while great for me, was a shadow of it's former self. Many good of the dealers of the past did not exhibit. COVID really took a toll on the industry. It forced a lot of dealers & customers online and it hasn't recovered yet.
II ended up spending the weekend in 3 dealer friends booth's talking about minerals, trading and buying.
Oh, I forgot to mention, the show is held at a Holiday Inn and each dealer exhibits in a hotel room. It's kind of cool as it's more intimate, but it can get crowded.
One dealer I hadn't seen in a few years was Chris Lehman of Lehman Minerals. What is special about Chris is he is a prolific miner of Eastern California minerals. This year Chris had brought a lot of beautiful quartz, amethyst, rutile, anatase & other rare California minerals. I scooped up a lot.
Smoky Quartz from Mono Co., CA
About 40 rare, type locality, Woodhousesite specimens from the Champion (Sparkplug) Mine. This one just sold.
About 70 smoky quartz crystals from Crystal Ridge in Eastern California.
As well as about 3 more flats of minerals I haven't photographed or inventoried yet including some in the photo below.
Over in my other friend's booth, Miners Kingdom, I picked up some tourmalines as well as the Greenlaws Mine fluorite.
Here is a beautiful, translucent, tri-color tourmaline from the San Diego Mine.
That one is definitely staying in my collection.
Erik of Miners Kingdom is a collector of Japanese minerals. He visited me last December and we jetted around Tokyo buying and selling minerals. His collection of both Japanese and California minerals is very impressive.
The stone in the bottom, right corner of the display case is a green vesuvianite from the Chichibu Mine I acquired back in December.
Erik is also a professional mineral cleaner so he took the vesuvianite specimen and really made it shine.
One of my favorite specimens of the show was this benitoite. Erik had told me about another dealer who had it and I should go look at it. I did and immediately bought it because the price was so good.
I didn't know though how special of a stone it would be. Who ever had boxed it didn't know much about benitoite or they would have noticed the Fresnoite attached to it. An extremely rare combination!
I was getting ready to sell it online when I noticed the orange color on it, fresnoite. Both benitoite and fresnoite are very rare, but having them together is 10x rarer. Now I can't sell it.
The show was very good, about as good as my old club's show the weekend before where I was able to pick up two museum grade benitoites for my collection, at least until the first one sells.
This one stays in my collection.
That's it for now. I am listing a lot of new gems & minerals on our Esty shop if you are interested, https://www.etsy.com/shop/Rt395Minerals
Thanks for reading!
