The Search for the Perfect Stone

Jan 02, 2024

By Rachel Monroe

For a few weeks every winter, Tucson briefly goes rock crazy. In 1955, local gem-and-mineral enthusiasts began hosting a get-together, an event that's since become something much more commercial, and much more overwhelming. This year, there were forty shows throughout the city, each of them a mazelike complex of dozens or hundreds of venders, drawing tens of thousands of visitors in total. Browsing one afternoon, I saw available for purchase a bathtub made of quartz, a case of onyx obelisks, an uncut twenty-two-carat diamond, a pendant made from a meteorite, a fossilized dinosaur tooth, and a daunting number of beads. A ubiquitous ad on the radio had an even more tantalizing proposition: "Do you want to take a picture with a baby goat inside a giant geode?"

North of downtown, mineral dealers from around the world have taken over a complex of storage units, storefronts, and showrooms. "We nicknamed it Mineral Mile," Jolyon Ralph said. Ralph, a genial, well-connected Londoner, runs Mindat.org, a mineral-education Web site. The Mineral Mile dealers focus on rocks in their raw, or raw-ish state. (A gem is a mineral that's been cut, polished, and faceted; not all minerals are suited to become gems—some are too opaque, or too soft—and many are more valuable in their uncut crystal form than if they’d been turned into gems.) Mineral collecting has gone through several eras. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European royalty amassed rare specimens as evidence of imperial reach and wealth. A hundred years ago, industrial titans did the same; J. P. Morgan, who donated much of his collection to New York's Museum of Natural History, has a form of pink beryl named for him. In the nineteen-fifties, as the atomic era spurred a new interest in Earth science, rock collecting became more democratized. Many of the rock hounds I met in Tucson traced their fascination back to their uncle's or grandfather's rock collection. (The hobby is persistently and overwhelmingly male.)

Now increasingly—and controversially—minerals are becoming an asset class. Arkenstone, a Dallas-area company that's become one of the biggest domestic dealers in fine minerals, had a prime spot in Tucson. Their wares were displayed in cases, artfully spotlit, each a marvel: a rope of silver, contorted like a piece of driftwood; an uncut diamond the size of a shark's tooth; a cube of fluorite the color and clarity of the Caribbean. "That case alone, that's probably, like, a million nine," Kevin Brown, Arkenstone's gallery director, said, pointing at a display with three different forms of beryl that seemed, somehow, to glow from within. I had been hearing about the company's founder, Rob Lavinsky, a prodigy of the mineral world, who had started selling five-dollar rocks at Midwestern hobby shows when he was twelve and, in the next forty years, parlayed his interest into an empire. "I always say, ‘When you bought your first beer, Rob bought a mineral,’ " Brown said. "And he's been investing in himself ever since." I asked if Lavinsky was around for a chat, and Brown gave me a gently pitying look; Lavinsky was apparently off entertaining some clients who’d flown in from China. "He's a hard man to get ahold of," Brown said.

Arkenstone has been pitching minerals as "nature's art," in an attempt to broaden the market for expensive rocks from a small cohort of enthusiasts to a wider swath of the wealthy. The hype has caused some grumbling among the more old-school parts of the mineral world. Prices have gone up, and many excellent specimens are being bought by people who don't know, or care, about their purchase's chemical composition. "It's not so much about the minerals," Ralph said. "They want the best, the prettiest."

If I wanted to see the really good stuff, Ralph had told me, I needed to head to the Westward Look, a resort in the foothills of the Santa Catalina mountains, where élite dealers met with "the well-heeled collectors who show up to look at the five-figure, six-figure rocks." The next morning, we drove there together, heading up a winding driveway to a collection of low-slung ochre buildings tucked among tasteful xeriscaping.

Many of the dealers at the Tucson shows work out of hotel rooms, setting up their displays between the bed and the bathroom, which makes for an oddly intimate atmosphere. At one of the lower-rent events, in a motel near the highway, I wandered through fluorescent-lit hallways that smelled of old smoke and peered into rooms where venders had laid out their glittering displays. It felt seedy and secretive, not entirely in a bad way. At the Westward Look, however, the rooms were luxury suites presided over by men in dark suits. Prospective buyers wandered between the displays, not saying much. Ralph hovered close to my shoulder and murmured their backstories into my ear: that's the man from Sotheby's; that's the former curator of London's Natural History Museum; that's one of the biggest collectors in China. Ralph was an ideal guide, analytical and efficient, with a good memory for gossip. After we left one dealer's room, Ralph explained that the man had been engaged in an extended feud with his brother, also a mineral seller; as it happened, the dealer in a nearby room had also been warring with his mineral-dealing brother.

Mineral specimens are prized for things like color (the more vibrant the better), shape, and symmetry; crystals in matrix—one mineral embedded in another—can be particularly valuable. Even to my uneducated eye, the rocks on display at the Westward Look were fantastic, with a kind of charismatic geometry and a color that hinted at some inner depth. Even so, there was apparently a world of even more fantastic crystals held in reserve, too special to be put on display. "We’re not going to see the top, top, top," Ralph said. "Those are hidden away. You have to be invited to see them." I’d heard rumors about a dealer who’d bought a mansion in Tucson, which he used only during the month of the gem-and-mineral show; supposedly, if you spent a million dollars on his wares, he would invite you over and open up his safes to show you marvellous, undreamed-of stones.

At the Westward Look, I began to notice evidence of secret dealings. In one room, I heard the rustling of tissue paper and looked over to see two elegantly dressed men bent over something in the bathroom, their faces rapt. "I need something major," one of them said. The dealer's assistant saw me watching. "Showing off the good stuff," he said, chuckling, as he steered me clear.

Wayne A. Thompson is one of the top mineral dealers in America, although he prefers to be known as a collector. He has shoulder-length straw-blond hair and an easy, informal manner. He told me that he didn't have a computer. "Bah!" he said, shuddering. "Every time I touch them, they mess up my head." Rocks were a different story. Sometimes he’d wake up in the middle of the night and take one out of its display case just to gaze at it for a little while. "You’ll have a girlfriend and she's looking at you, but you’re looking at that mineral—‘Look how beautiful that is,’ " he said, in a lovestruck voice. "The girlfriends get used to it."

Between customers, he showed me a recent acquisition, a purple cube of Illinois fluorite. "I bought that off Rob Lavinsky. It was one of his first significant rocks—he bought it with his bar-mitzvah money," Thompson said. "Look at that. That's the rock that turned into an empire."

A curly-haired German named Horst Burkard, an old friend of Thompson's, stopped by, and the two men quickly began reminiscing about the old days. They were both part of a cohort of baby boomers, mostly American and European, who had become legends in the mineral-hunting world not just as dealers but as adventurers. "You’re mining, you find a pocket, there's one you want and forty others," Thompson said. "That's how a collector becomes a dealer." Their paths followed a roughly similar trajectory: college in the seventies, an itch to travel the world, then a fortuitous discovery—for Thompson, in Mexico; for Burkard, in Morocco; for others, in Brazil or Pakistan. Burkard's story was a good one, burnished by only a little self-mythologizing nostalgia. Driving his VW bus across North Africa, he came across an intriguing rock. He went from village to village, showing the rock to kids, asking if they knew where he could find more. Finally, someone did, and they visited a local mine under the cover of night. (Mineral specimens are often found in mines dug for other purposes—a miner, looking for copper ore, stumbles on a pocket of azurite.) "The guy pulled out a piece of vanadinite this big"—Burkard said, holding up his pinky—"sitting on top of some snow-white barite." He began buying minerals in Morocco and bringing them to Tucson.

"In 1970, there were fifteen or twenty people who were really looking hard. By 1983, probably a hundred," Thompson said. "I sold one mineral in 1972 for three thousand dollars. The same mineral was recently offered for more than a million. In our lifetime, it went insane."

The influx of money, along with the spread of technology, meant that the old days of dusty, uncertain, exploratory work—scouting villages, crawling into caverns—were largely over. Now, Thompson and Burkard said, as soon as some promising crystals turned up, they were on the Internet. "Before, it was an adventure. Now it's just about being a businessman," Thompson said. "It's ‘Can you get there tomorrow? Do you have a pocketful of money?’ "

Technology has changed the business in other ways. Mining has always been a particularly asymmetrical industry, with low-paid laborers engaged in dangerous, underground work while the great profits are made far away. (The vibe at the Westward Look, where all the dealers I met were white, was unapologetically colonial at times; one European dealer with a fantastic collection of malachite bragged that his family had been working in the Congo for a long time.) But, thanks to the Internet, miners are increasingly aware of the value of their finds. "We would go to these places that felt like the edge of the world," Thompson said. "They didn't know much. Now someone finds something and everyone in the world knows within ten minutes."

Ralph stayed quiet as Burkard and Thompson complained about miners demanding high prices for the specimens they found. In the car, heading back to Mineral Mile, he told me that, although he hangs out with the big dealers, most of his specimens were in the three-figure range. "That show is called the Westward Look, not the Westward Buy," he said. Ralph was more equivocal about the democratization of information. "It's a big, big change," he said. "Now the guy who mines it has a cell phone. He can contact buyers and sell directly. Every week, I get messages from Pakistani miners on Facebook trying to sell me stuff. And some of it is very good."

Amid the rarefied world of the Westward Look, it was easy to forget that the specimens had ever come out of the dirt. Things were different at the Miner's Co-op Rock Show, "a show for diggers and doers," one of its founders told me—people who did their own mining, or made their own jewelry, or both. It was held in the parking lot of a sports complex, where venders parked their R.V.s behind their booths and camped out for the duration of the event. There were piles of raw rocks on tarps, sold by the pound, and men with craggy hands standing behind crates of cheap agate slices.

The populist version of rockhounding, with its promise of a payoff hidden in the dirt, waiting for the right enterprising person to find it, has been central to the mythos of the West since at least the gold-rush days. In the U.S., anyone can file a claim on eligible Bureau of Land Management property and start digging. One miner, who has become successful mining amazonite in Colorado's Pike national forest, gave me a long speech about how America's individualist, private-property-oriented approach to mineral rights was the foundation of our national prosperity and self-respect.

Treasures can turn up in unexpected ways. Trinza Sanders, a vender with sunbaked skin, told me that several years ago she’d been driving in the desert outside Palm Springs when she noticed something unusual sticking out of the ground. She pulled over and saw a charred tumbleweed, evidence of a recent lightning strike. The lightning's electrical discharge had vitrified the nearby sand into a rock called fulgurite, prized by crystal healers as an extremely high-energy stone. She dug out as much as she could and has been selling it at rock shows ever since. "It's got a perfect amount of silica, mica, and feldspar," she said. "You can drop it and it wouldn't break."

A few tables down, I met Chuck Larson, who introduced himself as "a prospector and a treasure hunter." He’d found a number of nuggets, he said, but his most consistent source for gold was the Salt River, a popular tubing destination east of Phoenix. "Thousands of hippies and teen-agers go there, they use their hands as paddles, they drink their beer," he said. When the water level dropped in the winter, he sometimes spotted the jewelry they’d lost. Once, he’d found a big ring that belonged to a state senator. It contained a full ounce of 10k. gold, worth about eight hundred dollars as scrap metal. Larson was clearly still miffed that the senator had offered him only eighty dollars for it. He kept the ring. "They voted him out in 2016," he said, sounding satisfied. "I wouldn't vote for him. He's cheap."

On Saturday, as the show was shutting down for the night, I finally got to meet Rob Lavinsky. He was a fast-talking, compact man with a visibly busy mind, and in such considerable demand that he suggested we’d be able to have an uninterrupted conversation only if we left the premises for a teahouse a short drive away. "I’ll be more relaxed there," he promised. As we walked to his car, a man in a baseball cap and leather jacket flagged him down. Lavinsky conferred with him for a moment, then slipped something into his bag. When he caught up with me again, he explained that the man was a rapper from Dallas who had decided to buy, but had not yet paid for, a twenty-thousand-dollar tanzanite crystal. He’d returned it to Lavinsky so that it could be prepared to put on display.

In the car, Lavinsky said that the mineral world was, by and large, a genial one, and then immediately began telling me about the exceptions. "I’ve had death threats. I’ve had a competitor call Interpol on me," he said. That last incident resulted in his being detained at the airport in Houston for eight hours before authorities released him without charges. (A colleague who was with Lavinsky during this escapade told me that it was unclear whether the competitor was to blame.) I asked what the allegations were. "Cultural patrimony," Lavinsky said. "But rocks aren't culture! They predate culture!" (So far, the mineral world has largely escaped demands that rocks be repatriated. "Hawaii is very protective of their rocks, for cultural reasons," Ralph told me. "Fortunately, there aren't many great minerals in Hawaii.")

At the teahouse, Lavinsky ordered a pot of longjing green tea and another of pu’er. We were joined by Joan Massagué, a dignified Spanish American mineral collector and the head of the Sloan Kettering Institute, in New York. Lavinsky pulled the tanzanite out of his pocket and set it on the table next to two small white boxes. Out of one, he pulled a Burmese ruby, a pillar of waxy red jutting out of a matrix of calcite. "It has no value to the gem cutters, but it's a perfect crystal," he said. "If you wanted this," he added, turning to Massagué, "I paid forty-five. I’m happy to make five grand."

Massagué demurred; he told me that he limits his collection to ore minerals, "with a special weakness for silver" and semiprecious crystals from the Himalayas.

Lavinsky was undaunted. "I’ll sell it for seventy-five, probably tomorrow," he said. From the second box, he removed a rare garnet. Rich green and dodecahedral, it looked like a die for an imperial game of Dungeons & Dragons. I cupped it in my palm and ran my thumb over its smooth faces. Lavinsky mentioned that it was worth about a hundred thousand dollars, which made it, I realized, the most valuable thing that had ever been in my hand.

Lavinsky leaned forward, his eyes gleaming. "You know, Jewel, the singer, was here this morning," he said. "And Big Sean, the rapper. Yeah. You’d be surprised." (Lavinsky later clarified that he wasn't positive Big Sean had actually been present.) Lavinsky knew that some of his peers grumbled about his skill at finding underdeveloped pockets of wealth and mining them for new clients. He believed that more money and more attention provided an over-all benefit to the field. Rising prices meant that crystals that would have been cut into gems were now more valuable as specimens, and sites that were tapped out of ore were now worth mining for fine minerals. For the first time, companies were financing mining operations that specifically looked for specimens to sell to collectors.

"Every year, you think it's a bubble, the prices can't keep going up," Massagué said, "but they do."

We drove back to Mineral Mile in the dark. Although the show was officially closed, a few dealers still had their doors open and lights on, hoping for late-night shoppers. Lavinsky was arguing that, for the industry to reach its full potential, it would have to outgrow the clubby and conspiratorial model of selling expensive rocks in person. He’d been one of the first to sell minerals online, and he was confident that Internet sales were the future. "This is chaos," he said, meaning, as I took it, all the schmoozing and secrecy, the thousands of hotel-room dealers and their backroom whispers, the hidden safes and piles of rocks on tarps. "We’re an inefficient market."

But Massagué wasn't sure. For him, the Tucson show retained its romance. "For most people, even for high-end collectors, it's about the thrill of the chase," he said. "Patrolling the hallways, running up and down, getting WhatsApps constantly: ‘Hey, have you seen this, who has it?,’ all day long." Inefficient, exhausting, exhilarating, the hunt for treasure went on. ♦