When people move to Las Vegas, they often buy a house. They may buy a car. When Nicholas Barnes moved to Las Vegas from Oakland, California he bought a mine.
Buying a mine (the mineral rights, to be exact) was far from easy, as it turned out. The process is not like buying a house — there is no equivalent of Zillow. Just finding one can be a challenge. Barnes, a 32-year-old Cirque du Soleil acrobatic rigger, pored over museum historical documents, studied maps, and searched through old claim records online. He created a list of 20-30 possible locations and went on scouting expeditions, clocking miles on foot in the craggy Southern Nevada hillsides.
“They give you geo points, but they’re not always right,” Barnes says. “You have to get out of your car and hike to look for it. A lot of them are hard to get to. One of them was an hour hike there and an hour hike back.” Each time Barnes found a mine, he dug around it for a week to see if it was the right place. If it wasn’t, he’d cross it off the list and move on. It took him about a year to find what he was looking for.
So why do all that work? Given that Barnes didn’t plan to run a mining operation, why spend months traipsing up and down overgrown mule trails in search of some long-shuttered copper mine?
Nicholas Barnes is a rockhound.
Rockhounding became popular in the 1930s. With the spread of the automobile, more Americans motored into the deserts and mountains, where they stumbled upon petrified wood and precious stones, which they pocketed as souvenirs. The Great Depression spurred further interest; unemployed men and women combed canyons and quarries in search of a pretty pebble or shiny stone — anything they might fashion into jewelry to hawk at stands they set up along the newly paved desert highways. It peaked in the early 1960s, with as many as three million enthusiasts in the United States, according to estimates from the Bureau of Land Management.
Today, rockhounding has gone the way of stamp-collecting or needlepoint — it still exists, but occupies a much smaller niche.
This is a fact that 81-year-old Del Walkenshaw knows all too well. Walkenshaw, who grew up in Fallon, became interested in minerals when he was four or five years old. His grandfather, a rockhound, pointed out various rocks as they walked together during hunting trips, cementing in Walkenshaw an intuitive eye for spotting valuable stones in the rubble. This wasn’t uncommon back then, Walkenshaw says. People knew about rocks and plants and wildlife, and they made a point of passing that information on to their children.
Walkenshaw, who owns Desert Art Supplies, remains an active rockhound, and a well-known one at that. He is a board member of the Southern Nevada Gem and Mineral Society, where he now leads groups of fellow geologists, jewelers, and rock collectors on monthly expeditions in Nevada and neighboring states, driving along the often bumpy, boulder-strewn roads in a jeep he nicknamed “Dirty Girl.”
Other rockhounds talk about Walkenshaw in awed tones, marveling at his ability to predict what treasures might be hiding in a sandy chunk of stone. They tell stories of him scrambling up steep hillsides with the ease of someone much younger. Walkenshaw shrugs off the compliments with a small smile. He just likes being outside, he says.
This is a sentiment he shares with many rockhounds. “I love being out in nature,” says retired school administrator Julie Cooley, as she clambers up a gravelly hillside near Goodsprings. “I love wandering around and when something catches your eye, you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty.’” Along with the thrill of the treasure hunt or the zen-like pleasure of quietly sanding a stone into a smooth gem, rockhounding lets them focus their love of the outdoors into a tangible hobby.
Cooley leans against her hiking pole, momentarily winded but smiling. The trail is devoid of hikers on this fall Tuesday morning, but were any around, their eyes might have been drawn to the sunlight dancing off the green shrubbery or to the bighorn sheep on the ledge above. But her gaze is glued to the ground. She names various rocks on the path, nudging them with her boot or hiking pole. She picks one up and holds it to the sunlight. It’s spotted with turquoise, though, Cooley explains, it’s not actually turquoise. It’s chrysocolla, a blue-green rock similar in color but far more common.
Cooley has been rockhounding for 10 years, since she moved to Nevada from Illinois. She got the idea after visiting a gem show in Boulder City and discovering that the desert is rife with colorful rocks, even fluorescent ones that glow in the dark. She joined the Southern Nevada Gem and Mineral Society, where she learned how to cut and polish rocks in the volunteer-run lapidary studio the club manages in an industrial park off of I-15.
“To me, it’s like unwrapping a present,” she says. “You never know what you’re going to get.” Though she’s not a professional jeweler, Cooley enjoys turning the rocks she finds into necklaces and earrings for friends and family.
Like many of the Society’s 500 local members, Cooley is self-taught; only a handful hold a degree in geology. Many get into the hobby after moving to Nevada and discovering that it is, as William A. Kappele, author of Rockhounding Nevada, described it, a “rockhound’s paradise.”
In addition to its diverse array of rock specimens, including fire agate, fire opal, turquoise, amethyst, garnet, agate, jasper, and petrified wood, Nevada offers rockhounders another advantage: millions of acres of public lands. While they can’t collect rocks in national parks, state parks, or national monuments, hobbyists can take home small amounts of minerals and fossils from Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands, and with surprisingly few restrictions.
Some turn those rocks into jewelry or sell them to collectors. But for many more, the thrill is in the hunt. “Once you start rockhounding, you have a dozen buckets of rocks in your garage,” Cooley says. Rockhounds talk in amused tones about spouses who don’t understand why they don’t just throw them away. They’re just rocks, some may say, in the way that some might say of the Mojave Desert, It’s just sand. But that’s the thing about knowledge — it opens your eyes to a world that had previously sat invisible. Once you know what you’re looking at, you can never go back to seeing that stone on the side of the road as just a rock.
Rockhound Eric Cifani can attest to this. “The more you learn, the more interesting it all becomes,” he says.
Cifani is leading nine rockhounds, ranging in age from teenagers to retirees, back down the mountain, their arms weighed down with buckets of rocks. They’ve just spent five hours digging in the trailings outside Columbia 23, the mine he co-owns with Nicholas Barnes and their partner Heather Perkins, and they talk about their finds the way others might gossip about a celebrity sighting — lots of “Wows!” and “That’s so cool!”
This is a familiar scene to Cifani, who not only leads rockhound tours to the mine, but also volunteers with the Southern Nevada Gem and Mineral Society. He’s been a jeweler for decades. His grandfather taught him the trade when Cifani was a boy. After his grandfather died, Cifani inherited all his silversmithing tools, which he still uses.
“I’ve always been curious about where rocks come from, where they’re mined,” Cifani says, and after he launched a jewelry business, he decided to learn more. Through the Southern Nevada Gem and Mineral Society, he and his partner, Perkins, met Barnes and learned of his quest to establish a mining claim. They all agreed to go in on the venture together, using Cifani’s experience working in title and escrow to help navigate talks with the BLM.
When Barnes finally found the Columbia 23 mine, after more than a year of searching, the trio “fell in love” with it, Cifani says. It was the perfect location — just 30 minutes outside of Las Vegas and relatively easy to get to. It began in the 1880s as a copper mine, and its last claim holder was a contractor who mined for cobalt for Tesla’s electric car batteries. The mine itself remains closed, but as holders of its mineral rights, Barnes, Cifani, and Perkins have full access to the trailings outside, which are brimming with chrysocolla. They’ve also found cobalt, copper, silver, gold, and more than a dozen other minerals — enough to keep rockhounds busy for decades. There’s so much, in fact, that the trio regularly offers rockhounds full access to the trailings — for a fee.
Cifani and Perkins use what they find around the mine to provide a sort of farm-to-table experience for their jewelry customers, many of whom like knowing that the stone in their ring or necklace has been locally sourced. For some pieces, Cifani posts what he calls “birth stories” — short videos that showcase its transformation from a rock to into a smooth, polished pendant.
“A lot of rocks aren’t sourced ethically,” Perkins says. “You got eight-year-olds in other countries mining for rocks.” As a fourth-generation-Nevadan, Perkins loves telling customers about her connection to the land and the local history that each of her pieces holds. She recently quit her job in the medical profession to become a full-time mixed-media artist, and she splits her time in between the studio and the mine. At 47, Perkins is one of the younger rockhounds in the Gem and Mineral Society — by almost two decades — though this appears to be changing. “Within the past few years, many younger people have been joining,” she explains. The Society even has an active kids club that meets once a month. Perkins speculates that this may be partly because “it provides a way for people to be connected to the earth,” which she says many are missing in their lives nowadays.
“This is just the most authentic thing I’ve ever done,” she says. “I’m a big weirdo, but I feel like I found my niche. I like being outside. It’s calm, it’s meditative. You’ve got the sun to your back, you see something sparkle. It’s a little like treasure hunting.”