Word on the Hill (3)

The Mount Baker Rock and Gem Club will be having its monthly meeting on November 18,Tracy Jackson, a director at large and lapidary instructor for the club.

The meeting will take place in the Lapidary Room of the community building at Bloedel Donovan Park at 7 p.m.

The meeting will feature a talk about volcanoes and the dangers of eruption by Doug McKeever, professor of geology department at Whatcom Community College.

The meeting is open to everyone who wishes to attend, and is not limited to current members.

The club also offers lapidary classes for a course of seven weeks at a time. They occur on Tuesdays and teach students to work with many different types of rocks.

“We teach you how to take a rock and make a cabochon,” Jackson said.

A cabochon, or a cab, is a rock that is cut and polished to be placed into the form of jewelry.

The rocks can also be used to make other accessories, such as small knives (image below).

The lapidary classes mainly focus on teaching students on how to work with the loud equipment used to cut and shape rocks, according to Jackson.

The types of rocks studied by the club vary from anything from Jasper to Stilpnomelane, and everything in between.

“By the end of the first night, you should be able to make a cabochon. It may not be perfect, but the others after that will get better,” Jackson said.

Every week, the class focuses on a different type of rock, and by the end the students should know how to deal with the majority of the rocks they will encounter, Jackson said.

The club also creates field trips where they take their students to sights to find different types of rocks.

The upcoming field trip is on Nov. 16th at 9 a.m. and will take place at Blanchard Hill where students will be specifically searching for Stilpnomelane.

Membership forms can be found on their official website and costs 15 dollars annually.

The Mount Baker Rock and Gem Club meet the third Wednesday of every month (except August and December) at 7 p.m. at Bloedel Donovan Park.