I am a field collector at heart and cannot stand hanging around the shows when there was rock to be moved somewhere in the never-ending search for shiny baubles which I believe we all look for when we are starting out in this hobby. I have to say that I never thought I would end up buying and selling mineral specimens on the Internet after a lifetime of getting bruised up and dirty collecting the quarries of Ohio and Southern Michigan as a snot-nosed kid in high school.

My dad (Joe Kielbaso) and I would go to all the usual suspect quarries on a long weekend such as Maybee and Newport, Michigan, and then head down south into Ohio if the Michigan quarries were not hitting and bumble around to Maumee (yellow Fluorites and some Calcites), Lime City (brown Fluorites and Celestites) and then maybe down to Auglaize for those delicious little purple Fluorite phantoms if we got lucky. One of dads' regular haunts back then was Rennselear, Indiana for the Pyrite and Marcasite that would come from the quarry. All I remember of this hole was the natural oil that was all over the inside of the pockets and by the time you were done digging your clothes had to be burned or thrown out.

In my late teens, dad and I would drive down to the Cave-n-Rock district in Southern Illinois and try to buy material from the miners who were working at the Denton Mine and the Annabelle Lee Mine at the time. Famous mines like Minerva #1 and the Deardorff had already seen their prime come and go by the time I was going down in the early eighties. One of our other favorites back then was collecting at Hall's Gap, Kentucky for the Millerite and Honesite Geodes that were found along the road cut. The great thing about collecting at Hall's Gap was the experience of collecting with my mentor, Neal Pfaff, aka "The Phantom of The Gap" and his lovely wife Chris!

After high school was over I decided that I wanted to head out West to collect at some of the famous and exotic localities that we Midwesterners dreamed of. I had the fortunate chance of meeting a man by the name of Stan Esbenshade who was a fellow Buckeye and was digging in Morenci, Arizona during the winters back then. I talked my way into working at the mine with him in late 1986. At the time Stan had just found the Azurite and Malchite Stalactites the year before and was still snarfing around the hole looking for any follow-up leads. On Christmas Eve, 1992, James Dunn, Elizabeth McKitrick and I found what we would end up calling the "Pigment Zone",which yielded several tons of the thick Azurite and was the highlight of my indentured seven years of service in that pit.

I was very lucky during this time to be able to meet great people like Bob and Carol Jackson at the Spruce Claim in King County , Washington. Bob taught me how to dance with a Cobra drill and move rock with powder, which sure as hell beat hammers and chisels as the only way to move rock. I was lucky in 1991 when Bob Jackson called me up and told me that his regular grunt for packing almandine garnets out of the Wrangell, Alaska locality had backed out and that I could go if could get from Tucson, Arizona up to Seattle in a couple of days.

Since the early 1990's I have worked for specimens in many mines: Bahia Santa Maria, Baja California for Sulfur; Brushy Creek Mine in Reynolds County, Missouri for Calcite with Marcasite (See Rocks & Minerals, Volume 72, Issue 6 November 1997, pages 370-373 for an article by Les Presmyk and pages 379-382 for an article by Rock H. Currier of Jewel Tunnel Imports.); Elmwood Mine, Gordonsville Mine and Cumberland Mines, Smith County, Tennessee.

As I said previously I now run and Internet based mineral company, Open Adit West, and spend much of my time traveling to acquire more specimens for the shop instead of the rock bashing I would rather be at.