Renaissance FAIRS
Circa Y2K..
Around 1999 I had some Small business interest in some Renaissance fairs around the country. My wife at the time was working Renaissance fairs so we would travel from show to show for 2 months at a time.
It was around this time, some friends and I took a trip to Arkansas to dig quartz and ended up digging on a ledge on Fisher mountain. The public mines weren't as safety conscious in 1999 and I had been doing some rock climbing for fun. So while there I climbed up a small cliff found my first pocket of quartz which turned out to be all phantom clusters. I lowered one by one down to my friend below me. I then had the bug. I had to dig more.
I think it was the following year. We started a small rock shop with a partner at the time at the Arizona Renaissance festival. We would mostly dig what we mined in Arizona, Arkansas and other places but soon started buying for resale in Tucson.
It grew and grew...
This history is to describe the other side of my business which is now retail Rock shops at four different Renaissance festivals across the country. During the weekends of February and March in Arizona , half of June and July in Colorado, August and September in Michigan and October and November in North Carolina.
I have a great team run by Fish and Julia who manage these shows and haul rocks from spot to spot.
We own the buildings at each of these locations.
A Great Environment and Tradition
At these shows, a person will be surprised to find high quality specimens of fluorite tourmaline and our interesting quartz, including some materials that we have mined ourselves all the way down to $1 rocks and animal carvings. We carry pretty much anything you can imagine in a rock shop. Large fossils, small fossils, dinosaur teeth, moldavite, polished lapis and Jade. And specimens of every affordable mineral we can get our hands on. We also have sifting mines where people enjoy digging a mixture of gems out of sand through running water.
We treat the renaissance as a separate business but there is obviously overlap. Feel free to come visit when you're at one of these Renaissance festivals, say hi to Fish and Julia and very rarely you'll run into me.