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CMS
April 2025 Presentation
The meeting starts at 7:00pm at St. Paul’s Episcopal
Church, 9200 W 10th Ave, Lakewood, CO 80215 (10th and
Garrison). Mark Jacobson will be the guest speaker (see
abstract below). There will be a raffle of 6 nice specimens
at 8:30pm with $1 tickets (cash only) that benefit the
CMS education program. We will also have a rock sale
with donated specimens, gems, and faceting material
that was donated to the club (cash, check, or credit
card accepted). Visitors and guests are welcome to attend
the meeting and presentation.
What’s
new in minerals in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, California,
and Arizona
as presented at the Rochester Mineralogical Symposium:
The Covid years – 2020 to 2023
Mark Jacobson
At the beginning
of March 2020, the spread of Covid across the United
States caused numerous social and educational organizations
to cancel meetings. The Rochester Mineral Symposium
in Rochester, New York had for more than 45 years been
held in the middle of April at a motel just south of
the Rochester airport. This 4 day meeting has traditionally
had several presentation on “what’s new in
minerals” for that year with input from the audience
on those discoveries or the surfacing of older discoveries
that people had never seen.
Attendance at this symposium numbered between 200 and
300 mineralogists, scientists and collectors who lived
in the nearby United States and provinces of Canada.
With the arrival of Covid, the on-site symposium was
canceled and converted to a series of Zoom internet
presentations. The following years of 2021 and 2022
were similarly converted to Zoom symposia. Although
covid was no longer a threat by April 2023, the motel
where the symposium was held had changed ownership and
refused to make the motel available. A search for a
financially affordable venue failed and the final Rochester
Mineral Symposium was held via Zoom in April 2023, thus
ending the largest and most well known symposia on the
East Coast after 50 years.
This
in-person talk summarizes the “What’s new
in minerals” presentations that was given remotely
by the author with a few post April 2023 discoveries
of significance. The discoveries discussed include some
of the best topaz, phenakite, aquamarine, and helvite
on Mount Antero, Colorado; bertrandite and phenakite
from Crystal Peak, Colorado; fluorite from the Specimen
Rock area, Colorado; rhodochrosite from the Sara Rose
mine, Alma, Colorado; green calcite from Garfield county,
Utah; fluorite, emeralds, feldspar pseudomorphs, calcite
pseudomorphs, and smithsonite from New Mexico; topaz
from Arizona; sand calcite from Wyoming; and pink elbaite
from southern California.
Mark Jacobson |
Green Calcite on petrified wood
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