When you first come into the show, you find yourself in a huge room filled with retail dealers and their selection of rocks for sale. There is a room to the right, almost as big, with rock club set-ups, educational displays and other dealers.
A space to the left of the great room, almost as big, had 4 hallways with rooms for dealers. Beyond that, another great hall with mostly fossil dealers. And further on, a hall of unknown size for wholesale dealers only - off limits to anyone but approved dealers.
Going down the center of the main room was double rows of cases, such as this. They held 'top end' mineral specimens, with the theme of Colorado finds. You can see gold, red rhodochrosite, green Amazonite, etc. etc.
There was case after case of exquisite specimens.
I was looking at stuff from personal collections (display only) that was better than what I'd seen in museums.
I particularly liked this display of green Amazonite and Smokey Quartz. The pictures at the back show the mine with the machinery and jack hammers. The picture 2nd from the left, shows someone harvesting the crystals from an opened pocket.
One of the dealers had this crystal 'flower' for sale.
These pyrite concretions caught my eye. The black and white 'Chrysanthemum' stones from China are pretty cool, too.
The green Fluorite specimen on the left is "eye candy". But, I thought the $40,000.00 asking price was a little unrealistic. In fact, I was in a constant state of "sticker shock", as specimens like I've bought for $20 were listed from $80 to $200 everywhere in the show. I was hoping to find some nice pieces to upgrade my collection, but I walked out of the show with almost all of my cash still in my pocket.
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