Colorado Mineral and Fossil Show (The "Holiday Inn" show)

I've just returned from a fun-filled long weekend at Denver where I spent time at two shows, the Colorado Mineral and Fossil Show at the Holiday Inn, and the 41st Annual Denver Gem and Mineral show, held at the Denver Mercandise Mart. This first part of two articles is about the "Holiday Inn" show.



Here's a quick rundown of video and photos showing some of the fun things I saw.

Axinite PM

Axinite PM, from Russia, had a huge range of new material from Dalnegorsk. In recent years we haven't seen a huge amount of new material from here, but this year has made up for it with new Datolites, quartz, calcite, sulphides of all sorts and these oddly ugly yet interesting siderites that caught my eye:

Crystal Classics

Crystal Classics/Kristalle had a new selection of the Tanzanian Spessartine garnets that we saw at Tucson, except this time they were a lot cheaper, and some of them were on matrix!






But that's not all... some of them had a strange orange/brown mineral attached, ID by the Natural History Museum in London indicates it's Kyanite!

Dave Bunk

Dave had this HUGE Wulfenite specimen which impressed us all:



Dave also had a fabulous Wheal Gorland Liroconite



but my favourite was, of course, this spectacular Proustite from Chanarcillo.

Fine Minerals International

At their room in the Holiday Inn, Fine Minerals International had some very nice minerals, but one that grabbed my attention was this very large Scapolite from Tanzania. This material has been available for many years, but this is one of the largest crystals I have seen.

John Cornish

John was at the Holiday Inn as usual displaying his usual fine selection of minerals, and in particular his Idaho classics. At this point I have to apologise to John, as I feel very guilty that I promised several times to return to his room to take photos/video for this report, but ran out of time on the last day, got called over to the main show and didn't return until very late.

What you would have seen in this report is a mention in particular of his microblasting equipment, which has proven very popular and effective in serious specimen recovery. Further information can be obtained from the Micro-Blaster website, and you can contact John directly on 360-457-7630 for sales enquiries.

Rocksaholics

My good friends Aisha and Arif had more fabulous Asian minerals. Here are a couple of tourmaline specimens they showed me:





And check out this Aquamarine 'whistle':

Wright's Rock Shop

Chris Wright was one of a handfull of dealers who were displaying some unusual nodules with pyrite from a chinese shale deposit. He had what I felt was the nicest one of these at the show:

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