By Lily Barnette

On Saturday, March 26, 2022, the Geology Program at Berea College had a field trip to the Lexington Gem and Mineral Show. In the email sent out by Professor Suzanne Birner regarding the event, “The Lexington Gem and Mineral Show is hosted by the Blue Grass Gem and Mineral Club of Kentucky in order to ‘provide an opportunity for the public to see and purchase rocks, gems, minerals, and jewelry.’” It was being held at the Clarion Hotel.

Once I saw the email, I knew I had to sign up with my roommate, Bosha Daniel. We both are interested in things like that, and luckily enough, we were two of the ones to get in! According to Professor Birner, the Geology Program was not expecting such high student interest because previously, in 2019 (pre-COVID), only a few people had attended. Nonetheless, there were about 20 students overall who got to take part.

Before going to the Gem and Mineral Show, we stopped in an area in Lexington with various food options like MOD Pizza, Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, etc. The Geology Program kindly paid for everyone’s meals. My roommate and I went to MOD Pizza. I had never heard of it before, but it was pretty good, and the pizzas came out extremely fast!

After arriving at the Clarion Hotel and being led to the show, we were met with a gigantic amethyst geode! In my opinion, it is gorgeous and really impressive. There was a huge raffle to see who would win it, and the staff had collected hundreds of slips of paper with names and contact information in a raffle drum. Unfortunately, we did not get to see who the winner was, but whoever won is very lucky because something like that can be worth hundreds to thousands of dollars.

Now, onto the fun part. There were so many booths of rocks, gems, and minerals. They had small pieces worth only a couple of dollars, and they had massive specimens worth thousands! Here are some of the pictures I took:

For those of you more interested in jewelry, they had that too! Most of the jewelry was hand-made, and there were quite a few lovely pieces from what I could see. Here are some pictures:

That is not all! For you fossil lovers, they had those too! There were a lot of display areas to view different fossils and booths selling them. I even heard they had a few dinosaur bones available. Here are some pictures:

The Lexington Gem and Mineral Show was a fantastic experience, and I recommend going if you can! The Geology Program is looking to sponsor this field trip annually, so definitely try to catch it if this kind of stuff piques your interest, you won’t regret it! The photos I took do not do the event justice, especially since I am horrible at taking them.

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