Mineral and Gem Show returns to Grassy Creek
The 41st annual Grassy Creek Mineral and Gem Show, which runs through Aug. 3, highlights Spruce Pine’s role as a mining hub.
The week-long event lures gem and mineral traders from across the country to offer their rock treasures — treasures with roots that not only span the globe from China to Yancey County, but often beyond in the form of meteorites.
Sponsored by the Parkway Fire and Rescue, the Mineral and Gem Show is a convention of “rock-hounds,” people who have become amateur or expert mineralogists through a passion for solid geology or as a means to explore the more metaphysical properties of stones.
Vendors Bob Snow and Lee Ann Aylward from Pine Knoll Shores, set up the two different sides of their Live Oak Rock and Silver Workshop, where Aylward shows her skills as a metalsmith crafting jewelry centered on various stones, while Snow commands the precious stones collection. Snow displayed some examples of aquamarine beryl from the Crabtree emerald mine in Little Switzerland, which in the late 19th produced emeralds for Tiffany and Company.
Snow also showed some examples of Thulite, explaining that “historically, Norway, where it was first discovered, and Mitchell County were long the major sites for the mineral,” though there has been a recent find in Okanagan County in Washington State.
Snow was also excited to describe the process of making such man-made stones as Fordite and surfite, slag accumulations of paints, resins, and fiberglass.
“Go check out the stall on the other side of the show,” he said. “There’s some funkite there that was developed from black light fluorescent paint. Crazy stuff.”
Snow also had some examples of picture jasper from Arizona, whose natural striations and coloring create what often looks like painted scenes. Throughout the show there are intriguing finds: rhodolite garnets, discovered in the late 19th century in North Carolina, whose name came from the similarity in color with local rhododendron blooms; canary yellow sulfur crystals mined from Mount Etna in Sicily, and thin slabs of bismuth, the pink tinged, silvery-white metal that features as an ingredient in Pepto-Bismol.
The Mineral and Gem Show includes many artists who work and sculpt stones, with demonstrations in cracking open thunder eggs and polishing stones for jewelry makers. All this, and the show is also a fundraiser for local fire stations.