After spending the night in Fallon, Nevada I headed east.  There are some striking wave cut benches from pluvial Lake Lahonton.
Those wave cut benches reflect a much wetter and cooler time in the Earth's past.  I would have been about 100 meters under water just 12,000 years ago... 

Here at Denver as of late Sunday the 12th.  A cursory run through the Holiday Inn indicates that the lull in significant new material coming to the mineral world is continuing.  The one item everyone is talking about is the cuprite specimens from the Rubtsovskiy mine in Altayskiy Kray, Russia.  This is not a new mine but a pocket was recently uncovered with bright lustrous crystals of cuprite associated with native silver.  I saw three dealers with specimens of these - Exotic minerals of Russia, KARP, and Axinite PM.  Axinite PM had the largest selection so picked up a group of specimens from them.  Not too cheap though...

This is a 3.7 cm specimen  of interconnected crystals of cuprite with crystalline silver.

At the Springfield show Walt Kellogg had some specimens from the El Mochito mine in Honduras.  Dave Bunk has a display on hand that is many times that of what Walt had.  Specimens of various sulfides such as galena, sphalerite, chalcopyrite, garnets and even some native silver - all are on display in Dave's room at the Holiday Inn.

A 2 cm silver wire.

A large cabinet specimen of sphalerite, andradite and quartz.

An odd pseudomorph perhaps.

Doug Wallace and Jon Voelter teamed up to purchase the Al Ordway collection.  Al was a fixture in the southern California mineral community and a prolific field collector - especially in the pegmatite areas of San Diego and Riverside Counties.  Arriving a day late meant that most of that material was gone before I could see it but I did pick a rare specimen of fresnoite he'd collected at the Junnila mine in San Benito County and also several fluorite specimens from Hardin County.  He had quite a collection of those in his inventory before his death.  Fresnoite is very close to benitoite in its chemistry with the formula of Ba2TiOSi2O7 while benitoite is BaTiSi3O9.

A fairly gemmy 1 cm partial crystal of fresnoite on analcime matrix.

A 5.5 cm specimen of deep blue color zoned fluorite with sphalerite from the Annabel Lee mine.

A 7 cm specimen of fluorite from the Denton Mine.

John & Maryanne Fender had a nice new group of garnet specimens from the Jeffrey Quarry in Asbestos, Quebec, Canada.  Lots of grossulars and a rare find of andradite var. demantoid with a strong chrysotile association.  Maryanne told me that the demantoids were found in 2008.  I found two specimens with rose pink colored grossulars which I picked up and also a few of the dematoids. 

A 5 cm specimen of asbestos hosting crystals of bright lime green dematoid to 4 mm across.

A 9 cm specimen with abundant crystals of pink grossular.

On Tuesday I made an appointment to see Dudley Blauwet at his home north of Denver.  Dudley is one of the more interesting personalities in this business and I can't help but be amazed at his daring travels to Viet Nam, Burma, Nepal, Pakistan and all points in between.  He's a captavating story teller and thankfully likes to write about his travels and experiences.  Anyway, I took the morning to plow through all of his flats looking for interesting things he'll have available at the show in Denver.  I found quite a few things including a flat of azurite that had been stashed away since the 90's from the Emma mine, Fierro, Grant Co., New Mexico. He also had a wide array of interesting things that thought would make for an update for this show.

A 3 cm specimen of spherical, crystalline masses of ilmenite and a titanite association from Tormiq, Pakistan.

A 4 cm specimen of a quartz crystal with quartz pseudomorphs of apophyllite from Karman, Pakistan.

A typical 2 cm specimen of azurite from the Emma mine in New Mexico.

One thing I was not prepared for was homemade meal prepared by Dudley of organic ingredients including some rare pepper varieties from Nepal! Dudley is a dedicated athlete who competes in running and cycling races regularly and he's dedicated himself to eating only the highest quality food he can find.  There's a lesson there for a lot of us. Anyway he showed me some of the pepper plants he's grown of these rare Nepal varieties.  I have a youtube video also with some narrative from Dudley regarding the peppers. Sorry about the camera angles...

One of two pepper plants in Dudley's backyard.

Ok, there will be more from Denver as I uncover it.