ABOUT US

The story of GEMinerals spans two generataion, when my father, as a young man working in the   Chihuahua province of Mexico

developed a keen interest in fine mineral specimens. He was there on his first electrical engineering job. He stayed there from

 approximately 1962-1964. Being ideally situated in such a prolific specimen bearing locale, he fequently visited the mines of Mapaimi,

Santa Eulalia, and Naica and various other off-beat localities to see what the miners had to offer.

This was all very clandestine as the owners of the mines would have spies in the town to report any

 miners who were selling minerals specimens, as back then, this was stricly prohibited by the mine

 owners. He would walk down some dark alleys, through a maze of building to come to a room filled

 with mineral specimens from wall to wall. He would buy the whole room for $25 USD.  Those were the

 days for sure, eventhough $25 back then would have been worth substantially more than now.

              Lloyd Peterson  in northern Mexico, crica 1962

After coming back to the Vancouver area the colletion was mostly packed up until we moved to Langley and he bought some

display cabinets. Here he displayed a selection of his collection.  I always remember as a child trying to get into the cabinets

as I was obsessed with the crystals. We moved from  Langley to Abbotsford when I was 14 and the

 collection was packed up an moved into the attic above the garage. There it sat for 1983-2002, during

 which time I was fortunate enough to graduate from BCIT with a diploma in forestry engineering in

 1996  and met my future wife in 2000, Eriko. In 2002 my fathers  house was being sold and he  asked me

 if I wanted to take the collection.  Of course I said yes thinking there were only 2-3 boxes; however

 when I went up into the attic I found over 15 boxes of material wrapped up in old newspaper.  It didn't take long to fall into love with the hobby

 and I have been very involved in it since 2002 as both a collector and dealer.  I sell at the Annual BC Rock and Gem Show that is held in

 Abbotsford every year and have been running GEMinerals.com since September 2004. The site was previously geared toward the Japanese

 market as my wife is fluent in the language.  This went on hold from about Nov. 2005 until just  recently as we were quite occupied having our first

 child, a daughter named Leina.  I have recently re-tooled the website to serve both English and Japanese customers.

One of the benefits of working in my industry, I have many opportunities to go to places few other rockhounds would get

 the chance to go. I work in the mountains, in remote places often only accessible by helicopter and in many virgin

 valleys before any road-building has occurred. As a result, I have had many opportunites to find interesting mineral

 occurances.  I have been very privalaged to have located - in conjunction with my rock-hounding co-worker - two very

 unique finds worthy of mention. First in 2005 we were lucky enough to find a few pockets of some very nice Chlorite

 included Quartz in the Whistler, B.C. area. This quartz is very high quality and similiar in some ways to the famous

           quartzes of the Alps.  A second significant find was made on Harrison Lake, B.C. in 2006 of high quality gem clear

        Quartz and Pyrite. This find is  unique in the number of gemmy Japan-law twins it produces; though small, they are of

Myself in front of a 200 year old Douglas-fir.          world class quality and easily worth gracing the top  mineral collections of the world in my humble opinion.

(Black Tusk and Harrsion Lake quartz pics here)