The trip out to Denver can be done several ways.  My favorite is to blast across northern California north of Mt. Lassen and then go through Reno and head toward Fallon on I-80.  From there it is US Hwy 50 across Nevada and Utah and then to I-70 which takes you all the way through to Denver.  It is 1250 miles or so and takes me 2 days to do it. Well this year it was all I-80 from Reno to Laramie, Wyoming.  The first leg is to drive north of Mt. Lassen and then hook up with US 395 at Susanville and take that all the way to Reno.  One of the things I failed to consider is what the availability of all that "Stimulus" money might have on road departments.  Much of I-80 across Nevada was one lane.... %!)_)#&&@ 

Now the road log...

A view of Mt. Lassen about 7:00 AM along Hwy 44.

Speeding on US 395 toward Reno.

Battle Mountain, Nevada has not got much going for it so I guess this will have to do.

Just east of Carlin, Nevada is the Univ. of Nevada's fire school.  It was oil fires on this day.

One of the jewels of Nevada - The Ruby Mountains.

The Utah/Nevada border at Wendover situated near the Bonneville Salt Flats.

About 20 miles from Salt Lake City you can see some old wave benches cut when Lake Bonneville was MUCH deeper.

About 2 miles east of the Utah/Wyoming border is one of the places every 13 year old male in America dreams of...

Wyoming is also noted for its expansive coal mines.

Most of Wyoming along I-80 is beyond boring.  After a while all you can do to stay awake is count antelope which are incredibly abundant. I stopped counting after 350...

Ok enough on the Travel Log.  Time for rocks!

Before leaving for Denver I put together a few updates for this show.  The first is a new "old" find of axinite-mg.  This past spring I was contacted by a fellow, now living in Seattle, Washington, who had lived in the Butte County area when California Highway 70 was being built back in the 1960s. During this time numerous outcrops with ferroaxinite were encountered.  However, one small podiform deposit caught his eye.  In one small deposit there were numerous, bright lustrous, pale beige to plum colored crystals of axinit associated with albite. At the time of the call, as it turned out, there was a show in Seattle that Marcus Origleri was attending.  I asked Marcus if he could swing by and take a look.  He graciously agreed and suggested that I get up and get these as they were clearly not "normal" axinite from California.  I had specimens analyzed by Bart Cannon for their repsective iron and magnesium compositions (In the world of minerals there are rarely nice homogenous things to anlayze.  In most cases where axinite is formed there will be a solid solution series of elements such as manganese, iron and magnesium. At some point the amount of one element or the other determines what we call them). These axinite specimens fell out at slightly more than 4% MgO.  The true end member of Axinite-Mg is 7.48% MgO.  After conferring with Marcus he pointed out that the determining point for classificiation as Axinite-Mg is 3.6%.  So, by that definition these can be legitimately called "iron rich" Axinite-Mg.

I have also included several random things from various locales in the first update.

There will be a lot more to come in the next week so stay tuned for new finds from here in Denver, Colorado!

2010
Tucson Show
San Francisco Show
East Coast Show
Denver Show
Munich Show

2011
Tucson Show
San Francisco Show
East Coast Show
Denver Show
Munich Show

2012
Tucson Show
West Coast Show
East Coast Show
Denver Show 
Munich Show

2013
Tucson Show
Sainte Marie Show
Crystal Days (Poland)
Munich Show