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| Lots of rocks here |
My wife Vicki decided it was high time we went down to
Bishop’s castle in south central Colorado near Wetmore to check on the owner’s
building progress. We hadn’t been to Bishop’s castle in quite some time so we were
curious to see how things were going.
To
learn more about Bishop’s castle and it’s builder/owner see:
http://www.bishopcastle.org/ I would say the castle is one of Colorado’s
oddities, but still inspiring to see what one man can do with his hands.
The plan was to visit the castle and then
have a late lunch in nearby Westcliff and head home from there.
After lunch we walked off our meal and much
to my delight and my wife’s indifference there was a well-stocked rock shop on main
street. The store was open but the owner was out of town, so no deals could be
made and the sales people couldn’t even seem to get their credit card reader to
work. Well my wife decided her walk
wasn’t done and went a few more blocks to the nearest ATM to make a withdrawal
and help me out. After checking some of
the labels on the minerals I realized the owner of this store was the mining partner of my former mentor--Ray Berry. I saw many
specimens from Ray’s shared claim called the 2nd Mesabi. Ray called
the claim Mesabi after the iron range in Minnesota due to the large amounts of
iron(goethite) he found on that particular claim site. I thought many of the minerals were fairly
priced. Some of his silver specimens
seemed high, but the Lake George minerals I’m used to seeing like amazonite,
smoky quartz and fluorite all seemed reasonable. Though the quality of these Pikes Peak Batholith specimens on display was about average in my opinion.
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| Specimens for sale from around the world include apatite, vanadanite, fluorite, topaz with elbite/cleavelandite and more |
The owner’s back room had about 40 flats of
crystals on display with bags of dinosaur bones and many other fossils as
well.
Underneath some of the displays I
noted another 40 or so boxed flats.
I
opened a few of them but found lesser material than what was on display.
I’ll bet there is some better stuff holed
away somewhere in storage.
Oh well maybe
another day.
Hat’s off to my wife Vicki
for tolerating an unplanned rock hounding expedition in Westcliff and getting
me some money from a nearby ATM to purchase some of the specimens. Sure is easier to purchase specimens than hunt them down and dig them out of the ground
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| Goodbye Sangre De Christo mountains, hope to see you again soon |
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