The Wonders of Rocks

January 5th, 2026

Throughout my life I’ve always had a love for rocks. Perhaps it’s because my Dad used to take me to the Natural History museum often as a kid, or because his father collected rocks and I inherited the collection, but for whatever reason I just find them so interesting.

Even like stupid dumb rocks that are just grey sometimes pique my interest, like something you could just find in your backyard (although, you can really find any rock if you are in the right backyard), but nobody cares about those rocks, and I honestly don’t really care about them too much either. The rocks that are the most special to me (and most other people) are the colorful ones.

There’s just something about nature creating something that looks so unnatural, minerals like Cavansite (photo above), which not only has such a special color, texture, and look- but is also incredibly rare. It makes you wonder, if all rocks were blue, red, orange, green, would the grey ones be just as special as the colorful ones today? I think they would.

I think at the end of the day that’s the main draw to these fantastic rocks, they’re always going to be one of a kind, they’re pretty much impossible to recreate (at least EXACTLY, I’m sure we can, as we do it with diamonds and such) due to the fact that it takes naturally millions of years for these structures to form.

I’ll go on eBay, or to my local rock store and buy rocks occasionally, but for me the most exciting aspect is going to be the thrill of finding something special, knowing you’re the only person to touch that rock in who knows how long, and likely the only person who found it to be special enough to take home with them, it’s completely free as well, and it’s the reason why I have a plethora of random rocks around my house that are only special to me.

My absolutely favorite type of “rock” if you would even like to call it that would be fossils. I think fossils are just one of the most amazing things. For the similar reason as a rock, the time it took to form, but the fossil you know didn’t take very long to form, some animal died and literally has been there in that exact position for sometimes hundreds upon hundreds of millions of years.

In the Mojave Desert there is a section of BLM land where you can go and attempt to find Trilobite fossils, which (I’ve attached a photo above, and) are ancient marine invertebrates, basically like a very very old shrimp or crab type thing- and while there are like a billion of their fossils all over the globe, it still is an incredibly special thing, heck, imagine the thrill of finding one out in the wild. I’ll be sure to write a blog post when I go out there.

Anyways, that’s all I’ve got to say, but thanks for reading!

James