Welcome to the Spa City Rock & Mineral Club. We're about seventy rockhounds in and around Hot Springs, from age eight to eighty-three, and we have the good fortune to live in the middle of the Ouachita Mountains, which have some of the finest quartz crystal in the world, a state park an hour and a half down the road where anybody can hunt for diamonds and keep what they find, and more interesting rock per square mile than anybody has time to pick up. We go out and pick it up anyway.

I'm Ira Cope, the club's field trip chairman. I'm 60, and I spent thirty-one years as a land surveyor for the state highway department, which means I have walked across more of Arkansas than most people have driven, and looked down the whole time. When I retired in 1997 my wife Jean said, "Now you can finally pick up all those rocks you kept talking about." She regrets this. Our garage has a path through it.

This will be our fourteenth show. The first one, in 1986, was six tables in a church basement and a coffee can for the admission money. Last year about 2,600 people came through the door in two days. Keith Rickman is the show chairman again this year, which means he hasn't slept since August.

What to see:

• The dealers. Eighteen of them, from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri and Louisiana. Quartz, of course, but also minerals from all over the world, fossils, rough for cutting, finished stones, tools and books. Our dealers are honest, and they'll tell you what something is and where it came from. If one can't, ask me, and I'll go have a word.
• Lapidary demonstrations. Members cutting and polishing cabochons on the club's machines, a faceter cutting a gem from rough (it takes all weekend, and you can watch it happen a facet at a time), and wire wrapping.
• The fluorescent room. A dark room with shortwave and longwave ultraviolet lamps. Plain-looking white and gray rocks light up green, red, orange and blue. Children go in, and do not come out, and must be retrieved.
• Club cases. Members' collections, with the Arkansas quartz case front and center. My case this year is novaculite: about thirty pieces, from rough to finished whetstones, with an arrow point a farmer gave me in 1974.
• The Wheel of Rocks. One free spin for every child. Every slot wins: a quartz point, a piece of amethyst, a geode, a shark's tooth, a polished agate, or the grand prize, a quartz cluster the size of your fist. The wheel was built by James Canipe in 1988 and has never once landed on the grand prize when a grown-up was spinning it.

We take a club field trip about once a month, except July and August, when Arkansas is a sauna with chiggers. Members only (it's an insurance matter), but you can come along as a guest twice before you join. Full write-ups, with who found what, are on the field trip reports page.

Our junior rockhounds, ages eight to fifteen, meet the fourth Saturday of every month at 10 a.m. at the lapidary shop with Anna Hakes, who teaches eighth-grade earth science and is not afraid of anything a child can bring her in a jar. They learn to identify minerals with a streak plate, a magnifier and a pocketknife (hardness tests, under supervision), they keep a collection in an egg carton with every specimen labeled, and they earn a little brass rock-pick pin for each step: twenty-five minerals identified, a field trip, a talk at a meeting, and a stone of their own cut and polished in the shop.

Nine juniors this year. A few of their 1999 moments:

• Francis (15) earned all four pins this spring and cut his first cabochon, a red jasper, on the club's machine. It's in the junior case at the show.
• Janelle (12) can tell you the hardness of every mineral on the Mohs scale, in order, faster than I can, and frequently does.
• Alfredo (9), our youngest, found a double-terminated quartz point in the tailings in March and hasn't let go of it since.
• Chelsea and Joshua (both 12) gave a talk at the June meeting on how geodes form, with a hammer, and there were pieces of geode on the meeting room floor until August.
• Deborah (15) is running the Wheel of Rocks at the show this year, with Justin (12) as her assistant. Do not try to spin it twice. They will know.

The club has a lapidary shop in an old two-bay garage a member's family let us have for a dollar a year in 1984. It has an eighteen-inch slab saw, two trim saws, a six-wheel cabbing machine for grinding and polishing cabochons, a faceting machine, four rotary tumblers that never stop, and a wall of donated rough to practice on.

• Open Tuesday and Thursday evenings, 6 to 9, and Saturday mornings, 8 to noon (except the fourth Saturday, when the juniors have it).
• Shop fee is $2 a session, for blades and grit.
• Before you touch a machine you take the safety class from James Canipe, who is 80, has run the shop since it opened, and has all ten fingers, which he will show you, and which he will explain is not luck. Safety glasses, no loose sleeves, long hair tied back, and water on the wheels, always.

Every member signs this when they join. I wrote it out the way I explain it to new folks on their first trip.

1. Permission first. Every piece of land in Arkansas belongs to somebody. Find out who and ask, before you go, not after. If the answer is no, thank them and leave. In thirty-one years of surveying I learned that most folks will say yes if you ask nicely, and almost nobody will if you don't.
2. Fill your holes. Every one. A cow can break a leg in a hole you left. So can the next rockhound.
3. Take only what you'll use. A few good specimens, not a truckload. Leave some for the next person, and for the kids.
4. Leave gates as you found them. Open if open, shut if shut.
5. Know where you can't collect. No collecting in national parks, our own Hot Springs National Park included. Most state parks don't allow it either. Crater of Diamonds is the one big exception, and it's the only one I know of.
6. Don't dig in highway road cuts. I say this as a man who used to survey them. It's against the rules, and a falling rock does not care that you were almost done.
7. Pack out your trash, and somebody else's if you see it.
8. Share. Show the kids. Show the landowner what you found on his land. Give away your duplicates. Rocks are for looking at.

For a different part of the country, I recommend Frank Delacroix's page, Rockhounding in the Mojave, on where to find agate, jasper and geodes in the California desert. He goes into the rules for collecting on federal land out there, which are a different animal from ours, since most of Arkansas is private, and his list of what to bring is as good as any I've seen. He tells people not to go out there from May through September because of the heat. Here we'd say the same about July and August, for the chiggers.

Meetings are the second Tuesday of every month at 7 p.m. at the lapidary shop, with a program (a talk, a slide show, or a member's "show and tell"), the field trip sign-up sheet, and coffee. Visitors always welcome. The October meeting is Tuesday, October 12, and it's the show wrap-up, so there will be leftover cookies.

Dues are $15 a year for one person, $20 for a family, and juniors under 16 join free with a member parent.

1999 Field Trip Reports · Arkansas Minerals for Beginners

Visitors since this page went up in March 1998:


Write to the club (Ira reads the mail): [email protected]
Last updated September 24, 1999