Tory Bonner: Hello, my name is Tory Bonner. I'm with the San Juan County, Gem and Mineral Society, and I am here to talk to you about the annual San Juan County, Gem and Mineral Society, Gem and Mineral Show that we have every year here at McGee Park. This year we're going to be in the convention center, which is the first building off the entrance.

The show is going to be July 4th, 5th, and 6th. We're going to have the show start at 10 in the morning until six in the evening on Friday and Saturday, and then from 10 to five on Sunday. The show is an awesome place for anybody who's interested in fossils, minerals, jewelry making, rock hunting, or if you just are curious about it, the mineral specimens there are wonderful, wonderful decorations if you're interested in really cool and pretty things. I wanted to let you guys know that Friday is kids day, so we're going to have special events going on for kids on Friday, which is the 4th. What we have there are obviously gems and minerals, but there's also fossils of every shape and size that are legally obtained.

I don't know if everybody's aware that hunting fossils is now illegal in the United States. You have to either be on private land to be your own fossils, or you have to purchase them from legal vendors who get the specimens from overseas. We also have a cool vendor there that has geodes that he brought in, and he will let you purchase a geode, and he will crack it for you.

Which is really fun to watch. And the kids love those things. We have a kids area that's dedicated to kid things where they can dig through the sand to look for little treasures that they can find, which is absolutely free. They can color with coloring sheets. They can purchase a rock to make a pet rock.

We have the things there for pet rocks. They can pick up our fossils that we have there, or minerals and specimens and touch them and look at them and talk about them. We have people there to introduce different aspects of geology and fossils and minerals and wonderful, wonderful people. Not to mention a black light tent where they can go in and see the UV light, how it interacts with the minerals and, broadcasts the ultraviolet reflection that some minerals have, which is a really fun way to learn about minerals.

And everybody loves that sort of thing. We have vendors there that do equipment. So if you're into lapidary, which is making jewelry of all kinds, cutting the rocks, polishing the stones, getting them fit into their jewelry settings, we have people there who have that equipment. They also have equipment for rock hounding.

So if you need picks and shovels and different sorts of things to help you find the minerals in the wild. One of the things our club does is we go out every month and we have mineral and fossil hunts, depending on what we're looking for. We mostly focus in the fossil department on petrified wood, but sometimes we do the invertebrates like brachypods or crinoids, different things like that, that we have in this area.

We do have fossils of every shape and kind in this area. It's a wonderful area for rock hunters. If you're not aware this area that we live in in San Juan County was once what they would call the interior seaway. So way back in time, the middle part of America would've been covered with an ocean.

And as the oceans receded and different erosional events brought more sediments down, it made beaches on the shore and it was at the time of the dinosaur extinction. So the boundary, what they call the KT boundary, is right here in our area. So we have the place where the extinction happened and we find all the fossils here, which is really fun to look at.

We sometimes just go on viewing trips where we go look at the different places where there's dinosaur fossils. But we can find those and then we can find the fossils that were the remainders of after the dinosaurs, there were lots of little things left over. Less big fossils because most of the large creatures were obviously made extinct at that time.

But we have wonderful things all through this area that we as a club go do. The other things that we do as a club is we have, Rock House is what we call it, but it's a lapidary shop that we open to the public. You just have to pay a fee and you can come do rock cutting, like cut slabs, cut cabechons out and polish them.

We have all the things there to do that. It's a wonderful opportunity for people who are interested in any kind of jewelry making. We can get you pointed in the right direction. We don't have the silversmithing part of it set up yet, but we are working on it. Our club is one of the most fun and exciting things.

If you've got kids that love rocks, we've probably got something or somewhere that we can direct you to go do. We work with a lot of different organizations in the community. We're involved heavily in the Sherman Dugan Museum of Minerals and Fossils.

We help set that up the museum. We lead tours for school groups that go through there. So our membership is pretty active in the community doing things like that. In addition, we work with the uh, E Three Kids Museum and we do rock hunting and mineral hunting tours with kids through the E Three Museum.

Sometimes it's homeschool groups, sometimes it's just whoever they gather up and we do things. It's a really fun and exciting way if you want to help kids get interested in science, if you want them to just have activities where they're outside, which is getting to be more and more important for the kids these days, I think.

About the show; we also have a food truck there for you. The bathrooms are inside. It's all air conditioned, which is sometimes really important when it gets to be the 4th of July. The heat at that time of year can be pretty bad. So we've made it so that that's a little more tolerable. Just come inside, get out of the hot, enjoy the vendors.

The vendors have unbelievable specimens from all over the world. They bring in everything from big amethyst cathedrals that everybody loves, all the way to little tiny tumbled stones for the kids. Anything you can think of, they've probably got it there somewhere. Just come on in and enjoy the handcrafted jewelry.

 Lots of local vendors too. If you guys know BOLO Ties and Butterflies, they're part of the show. We've got other local vendors that only sell their wares at our show. They don't do much, as general commerce with it, but we do try to cater to local vendors if you're interested. Our spaces this year are getting pretty full, but if you're interested, you might, contact me.

We can work out for maybe next year getting you into the show if you'd like to make jewelry or if you are interested in polish slabs and cabachons and things like that. I hope everybody comes out to enjoy the show this year. We work hand in hand with the City of Farmington to be part of the Freedom Days events.

They have us listed in their event and we have been host out there to the people that are going to enjoy the fireworks, but I understand that is not going this year. But we try to help wherever we can. I hope everybody takes an opportunity over the three days of the 4th of July weekend to come visit us at that end of town. And I thank you guys for tolerating me here, and we'll see you later and have a good summer.