It’s All About The Stone

It definitely had my name written all over it and so I bought it. All winter I had been on the lookout for a new watch to wear during the upcoming summer season at Yellowstone. A small attached card noted its attributes: “Represents inner strength and lasting beauty. Strengthens your endurance to any situation or issue in your life. Assists in the rebuilding and reconstruction of any disarranged skeletal structures. Found in Utah.”

Whatever. All I knew was that these dinosaur bone beads were about to find their new home on my wrist.

Over the past half a dozen years I have bought quite a few items from Sandy WhiteWinds at White Winds Stone Jewelry. “It’s All About the Stone” was her mantra when I first found her little booth at the summer Groovefest Music Festival in Cedar City. I was working on my geology degree at the time, studying the metamorphic rocks in the Beaver Dam Mountains of southwest Utah. What caught my eye at Sandy’s booth was a pair of earrings with small blue Kyanite beads.

Kyanite is a mineral that is found almost exclusively in fine-grained sedimentary rocks that are rich in aluminum. Under the extremely high pressure conditions that exist deep within the Earth, these aluminum–rich rocks have at some time been metamorphosed into something else such as gneisses, schists, amphibolites, and eclogites. Along with its buddies Sillimanite and Andalusite, Kyanite is a very important mineral used in identifying the grade and type of metamorphism of the original host rock. The three minerals have the same chemical composition but each is stable at different pressure–temperatures conditions.

In the mineralogy lab at Southern Utah University we saw lots of Sillimanite in our slides from outcrops in the Beaver Dams, but did not (back then, anyway) see evidence of any higher–pressure Kyanite.

Nevertheless, these earrings had my name written all over them.

I bought other earrings from time to time, simply because of their inherent coolness. No fluff or frills, just the stone.

One Groovefest afternoon I brought a couple of small rock samples to Sandy’s booth. I had found them in the Beaver Dam Mountains and wanted to know if her business partner could transform these unassuming chunks of dusty blackness into a pendant and a pair of earrings.

After a few weeks of eager anticipation, I drove up to her shop to claim the creations.

As of that day I am the only person I know with earrings custom made from amphibolite (ancient metamorphosed basalt) along with a pendant whose origins can be traced to the Earth’s mantle. Woo hoo!

These jewels definitely have my name written all over them.