I have been fascinated by meteorites since childhood. For over three decades we were actively selling meteorites and tektites worldwide. For over fifty years I have been cutting them. At first, I cut for several other dealers of the old guard. This was back when we bought and sole from printed mailing lists or by phone calls to see what […]
As I sit here gazing out the window at the atmospheric river that is roaring through my mountain town. I am using this dramatic time to write my next article first of a new year. A friend of mine, Mally, who I hike with sometimes took this picture and sent it to me. He hikes rain or shine with his
I bought my first meteorite over 57 years ago. I had already found four small irons at Meteor Crater when I was about 15. They were mixed in a box of iron shale and other rocks from the crater until just a few years ago. I did not have the knowledge as a youngster to tell them from the iron
In my thirty years of working seriously with meteorites there is one thing I have not had much experience with, slag. It is listed as one of the more common things submitted to laboratories for examination. I had an interesting and fun time with a piece of slag recently. I walk and hike most days and have recently increased my
To be honest with all my readers, after 25 years of writing hundreds of articles on meteorite related topics my mind is as dry as the desert sand of places meteorites often come from. It takes me longer to come up with a good idea for an article. As I sat here in despair of any mental stimulation for what
I have another lecture on Meteorites to give at the beginning of next month. The presentation was supposed to happen in April, but it was snowed out. I was sitting in my office one day recently making a post for social media. I saw nothing but meteorites around me. Every shelf and display case and my actual desk had meteorites
Paul Harris and I have been in business for a long time. Almost thirty years selling meteorites worldwide. I have cut roughly 40,000 slices of space rock during that time. I have lapped and polished windows into thousands of additional meteorites and fragments of meteorites. From nearly the first day that we started, when I build my first saw it
The first week of December I took a trip to Houston with my second daughter to visit my son and his family. We had several events planned during the trip all of which I would highly recommend to any visitor to Houston. We attended a truly wonderful performance of Dickens “A Christmas Carol” at the Alley Theater in Downtown Houston.
Over the many years that I have been a meteorite collector and in the meteorite business I have had the opportunity to speak to dozens of groups and tell the story of meteorites. I thought when I moved out of a large metropolitan area to a quiet retirement in the mountains that my speaking engagements would be rare for the
There is nothing very meteorite related in these article. As we collect meteorite many of us also get pieces of the ephemera, the things that go with meteorites but really aren’t meteorites themselves. Well I have an area of my collection that is sort of in between. So I am just going to feature an area a bit strange and
About a year ago I joined the local Gem and Mineral Society. It has been a great experience. I was needing something to do and a way to make a few friends. The field trips have been fun, and I have found a lot of rocks. No meteorites yet but hoping to do some serious hunting in the fall again
Over the last several decades I have sent off meteorites to be classified and have a couple going through the process nearly all the time now for fun. There are some troublesome questions that come up along the way on some meteorites. It might be an instructive discussion of how some of these potential pit falls can be avoided when
As long time readers know I do several meteorite classification projects with Jason Phillips every year for fun. It gives us a chance to stay in touch more and chat a few extra times during the year. We had been waiting for NWA 16447 to make it into the Meteoritical Bulletin for a while and be officially published. We knew
I have hunted meteorites since I was a preteen and though I did not know what I was looking for in the earliest years I got every book I could find at the library and took every opportunity to hunt. My parents were building houses out in Bullhead City, Arizona when only a couple of hundred people lived there, and
I did an article for another media outlet a few years ago about one of the most interesting and least understood impact materials found at Barringer Crater better known to the public as Meteor Crater in Arizona. Let’s take a trip back in time to 50,000 years ago and imagine that it is a pleasant morning. The animals
