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"Mineral City"
La Fuente de Piedras Mineral Show The Rock Yard Mineral Galleries on Lester Lester, Oracle, W Plata Street (six blocks) January 31 - February 15 The move from hotel venues to year-round industrial building rentals continues to grow for Tucson’s self-named “Mineral City.” It is a mixture of very high-end dealers (with prices commensurate to the slang “high end”) and other dealers with more reasonably priced offerings. The difference: high-end are stupendous and amazing, eliciting a feeling of “Gosh, is that even possible or am I dreaming?” while other reasonably priced specimens are “Fabulous, I think I want one of those for my collection.” Not to put too fine a point on it, we like looking at ALL of the mineral specimens for sale. We don’t covet the specimens we see in the Smithsonian and we don’t covet those of the high-end dealers – we just like to look at all of them! The downside of Mineral City and La Fuente is that many of the dealers who used to set-up at both a hotel show and the Main (club) Show at the Convention Center now set up ONLY in Mineral City and no longer desire to display at the Club Show. Over the long haul this desertion is bound to have a lasting impact on the Club Show’s ability to continue without dramatically increasing admission fees for the public and booth space for the dealers. |
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The Al and Sue Liebetrau Collection
The Arkenstone is dispersing major pieces from the mineral collection of our very good friends Al and Sue Liebetrau. Al, who passed away in 2023, was a an avid collector of petrified wood and fluorescent minerals as well as spectacular minerals. We spent an afternoon with Sue last June when she was sadly considering offers for their incredible mineral collection (arguably containing the best native silvers of any collection in the country - equal to any of those that we saw when we visited the museum in Kongsberg, Norway several years ago). Sue was the original rockhound and Al caught the rock and mineral collecting passion from her early on in their relationship. Their specimens, always selected jointly, won many awards over the years in competitive showings. While it is always sad when we lose good friends, it is gratifying to see that their collecting strategies will continue to be recognized by new collectors who note the annotation ex-Liebetrau in their collection catalogs. |
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Imagine seeing fossils that are only months away from their initial death and entombment! They were killed and preserved by a concentration of borax in Owens Lake during the incredible rain year of 2023. They were covered with borax and firmly cemented to lake bottom sediments by that same mineral. It was a really serendipitous discovery that, if gone unnoticed, would have gone into the rock record of lake bottom sediments of this major drainage basin of the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains.
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Tucson Gem and Mineral Society Annual Show
AKA “Main Show” at the Convention Center Tucson Convention Center, 260 S. Church February 13-16 This is the club show that started it all with their first club show at an Elementary School in 1955 (although the club itself had been started nine years earlier in 1946). The show is now held at the Tucson Center and attracts thousands of visitors, hundreds of dealers, and scores of exhibit cases. It is a four-day extravaganza that features lectures, seminars, specialty groups like micromounters, school groups with assignments to answer questions about minerals and geology, and all of it arranged around a show theme. Some years the theme is a particular mineral, sometimes a specific locality, sometimes a wide area (a country or continent) and sometimes, like this year, a passing fancy like the color green! Green gems, green minerals, green fossils (or life that was green prior to fossilization) all qualified for meeting the show theme. For those of you reading this who are on our mailing list, you already knew that the theme was going to be a green because we announced it with a Christmas greeting featuring green petrified wood specimens in honor of the upcoming show. The part we like best about this show is the fact that there are display cases put in by many top international museums. They bring some of their best and most attractive specimens to display. The very serious high-end collectors also set up cases of minerals that will simply “knock your socks off” to see – pieces that come out into the open only for the Tucson show and then likely never to be repeated again. It is an experience that should be on every collector’s list of goals, but as we said at the beginning introduction to Tucson Impressions 2025, it comes with the strong possibility of becoming an annual habit. Once is not enough – you will want to return time and time again as we have! |
Wolfe Gems and Jewelry -
Steven Wolfe with his loyal employee Terry
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Thanks for coming along with us!