Rick Hudson - travel writer and author

This entry appeared in the British Columbia Rockhounder, V3, n2.

Around the mound in Tucson, 2000
Rick Hudson

Aah, those bright spring days in Arizona, where the kids are already out practicing baseball in the park under the floodlights in the evening, where the trees are just starting to green up, and back home most of BC is still in the grip of winter! What better time to take a stroll around the greatest gem show on earth, and see what's new this year.

Every show there are trends, but sometimes it takes a while to notice them. A couple of years ago the Russians started to arrive. Glasnost was in vogue, and a steady stream of new and exciting minerals appeared from behind the old Iron Curtain. This rockhound particularly liked the huge quartz crystals that arrived. Measuring as much as a foot across and more in length, they showed perfect clarity and just cried out to be turned into spheres. I often wondered when that perfect 13 inch quartz sphere in the Smithsonian in Washington would lose its claim to being the largest perfect sphere in the world.

Well, the Russians have been here a while now, and there are other 'new' attractions. Starting two years ago, and definitely noticeable this year, the minerals of the Malagasay Republic (Madagascar to you) were visible everywhere. A large, mostly volcanic island off the east shore of Africa, the country is probably better known to the younger generation as the home of most of the lemurs in the world. But the gemstones are astounding too!

Street scene trading.

For some years, the best celestite crystals in vugs have come from there .. beautiful clusters of blue facets. Then came spectrolite (labradorite), that glorious feldspar with the biggest and best blue and yellow flashes that has all but supplanted large opals, which are now almost unavailable. This year there seemed to be even bigger spectrolite pieces than ever. This writer saw polished baroques as big as a square foot across, and all solid fire. The quality of carving has improved too, so the fish and spheres and animals all have a really great finish. And there's plenty of rough available for as little as C$10/lb.
New deep raspberry pink rhodonite deposits have been making their appearance from Madagascar too, but probably the most exciting new item was a new pocket of large blue sapphire crystals that were being sold not by the carat or gram, but the pound!
Talking of rhodonite, closer to home the Anoraq Mine just over the border in the Yukon (held by BC's Kirk Makepeace and Earl Matheson of Surrey, BC) has been sub-leased by a Whitehorse operator, and there were some very nice pieces on show in one of the tents at the Four Corners Hotel on the Strip. Good to see some material from that source .. always a great colour, and fully Canadian.

The Strip has always been my favourite area at Tucson, running along the I-10 Highway from Congress Street in the north to 22nd in the south. Not fancy. Not clean. But some of the best bargains can be had along the Strip (just as at Quartzite), and often from the most unlikely dealers. This year there was a huge influx of African dealers selling African memorabilia, and I don't mean rocks!

Spectrolite at Congress Tent.

There were spears and stools, and hand-made beads and weavings and tables and masks and long knives and more too. And the Middle East was there too, with carpets and kilims and hook-stitch rugs and .. sort of reminded me of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, without the coffee.
Back to rocks and minerals … this year InterGem added a huge tent next to Congress's already huge tent. The result was a great concentration in good deals in one area, with loads of free parking. Tucson had been suffering a 3 month drought at the time of the Show, so the Congress area offered a fine coating of powdered dust that covered everything and everyone day after day, as the sun baked down and the traffic rolled in and out. No amount of watering by the sprinkler truck, nor calls to slow down from the grizzled traffic directors, could halt the steady accumulation of dust on everything. Pity the poor guy selling rainbow obsidian .. his feather duster was busy all day.
The Inn Suites have become a popular venue for sellers .. the large lawns and ample shade are a welcome respite from the dust and heat of the Strip, and it was there, among the usual vendors of Moroccan fossils and Chinese fluorite that this writer came across Grenville Minerals of Kingston, ONT. They have a number of claims in the Ontario and Quebec areas, and produce some great and unusual material. Bright red eudialyte and agrellite from Kipawa, PQ, minerals so unusual my Schuster didn't even list them, were there for the buying, plus the ever popular wernerite (a UV sensitive scapolite from Grenville, PQ) just begged to be taken home. They also showed some nice apatite crystals, some pretty blue-green amazonite (a microcline feldspar) and, finally, some labradorite from ol' Canada's Labrador coast. Nice to see the home stuff, and good fire in it too.
Readers of last year's Report will recall I commented about the exorbitant price of meteorite material, considering about 20,000 tons of the stuff drops in annually. This year, I'm happy to report, there appears to be an "adjustment" in the market (is that the right word?), and prices are coming down to earth a bit, no pun intended. Where small pieces of the more popular showers (Gibeon, Campo de Cielo) used to be about a buck a gram, I saw several displays offering US$0.45/gm, and one place where spheres were 55c/gm! And complete with the Widmanstatten pattern etched on the surface. (For those who aren't familiar with meteorites, this is the characteristic 60 degree crystal pattern found in all iron-nickel meteorites, and is the result of forming in the zero-gravity environment of space.)

While still on the subject of meteorites (a favourite topic) there were nice pieces in the 1-10 pound range from Nantan and Juancheng in China selling for US$25/lb, which shows there's finally a capitalist out there willing to undercut the market! Several Chinese dealers also brought great mineral specimens .. cinnabar, realgar, cassiterite, goethite, incredible stibnite spears, a variety of purple-green fluorites, and nicely formed fossils too.

Meteorites are coming down ...

OK, if we're going to go to remote places to track down some exotic minerals, what about Greenland Resources, who showed two new gemstones at their booth in the GJX .. a beryl silicate they called tugtupite, and the so-called "opal of Greenland", nuumite. Trust me, I'm not making up these names! Tugtupite is a brilliant clear red. The only specimens available to look at (couldn't afford to buy anything!) were baroques and cabs, but Helge Jessen assured me faceted pieces were on their way and would be shown later in the show. The nuumite pieces were likewise baroque, but had some nice colour. My research revealed it's a form of anthophyllite (look it up, the same as I had to!) which is a complex silicate that, yes, is found in Greenland, according to Schuster.
I suppose since we are on the subject of weird stones from wonderful places, this report wouldn't be complete without one more tale of remote effort in a wild place .. this time the source is a rock cutting in the mountains of the north of Namibia (South West Africa). A thousand sandy kilometers from the capital Windhoek, bright orange garnets with a RI of 1.8 are being marketed as, surprise, "Mandarin Garnet". The colour is pretty shocking. There's nothing else quite as wild (apart from Australia's pink diamonds). No one, having seen one, could ever misidentify them afterwards as anything else, and if you like your gems distinctive, then this sparkling orange-red stone is for you. Or your mother-in-law. Whichever.
There's always so much to see and do at Tucson. There are numerous shows and the main Exhibition, which I haven't even mentioned. Well, that's for someone else to do. For me, the Show is about the small dealers and the back booths, where buckets of 'stuff' are there for the curious to find and identify, where opals can sometimes change hands for a song, and where sunstones (feldspar) the size of apples (from Madagascar - again) are so beautiful you wonder why you've never even heard of them before. Well, actually, this is their first year's appearance, and the Oregon crowd don't know what's hit them yet. Plus peridots from Pakistan the size of acorns, lapis crystals from Afghanistan the size of plums, selenite from Morocco the size of melons .. so many places, so little time.
A week later, with brown knees and gritty teeth, it's the end of another great Tucson Show for me .. the first of the new millennium. There, I almost managed to get through a whole article without using the 'm' word. See you all next year!