It’s Always Sunny in St. David

by Keith Krizan October 4, 2024

As found at: https://patagoniaregionaltimes.org/its-always-sunny-in-st-david/

 

There are many treasures to be discovered in Southern Arizona.

According to the website for the Arizona State Mine Inspector, “The earliest indication of mining in Arizona may be as old as 1000 BC when inhabitants of the area were already using turquoise, coal, clay, and many minerals in their daily life. 

Even before the Spaniards came to the southwest, Native Americans were using copper and turquoise to fashion jewelry that was traded over much of North America.”

By the 1690s, with the arrival of Spanish Jesuits, early diggings had probably already occurred in the vicinity of the mission established at Tumacacori in what would become Santa Cruz County. The ghost town of Salero, east of Tumacacori in the Grosvenor Hills, began to grow in the 1860s around those earlier Spanish workings.

As the easily exploitable placer gold deposits in California pinched out in the 1850s, attention was turned to other western areas. Arizona became the focus of intense prospecting. In the 1860s, placer gold in the Hassayampa River and in the Bradshaw Mountains led to boomtowns and riches.

The discovery of silver in the Tombstone Hills in the 1880s bequeathed to Cochise County the rollicking city of Tombstone, the city too tough to die.

One of the easiest ways to acquaint oneself with the 10,000-plus mine sites, quarries and placer deposits of Arizona is to go online to Mindat.org. (“Mindat” is short for “mineral data”). Originally started as a personal database by Jolyon Ralph in 1993, Mindat became community-editable seven years later. It is now the largest open database for rocks, minerals, and meteors in the world, and includes the places where they have been found. 

This powerhouse boasts 6,066 mineral species at 404,840 localities and 1,376,977 photos. Through the miracle of hyperlink these are all available at the press of some highlighted text. Mindat Arizona contributes some 11,025 localities to the Mindat site.

Today, Mindat is run by the not-for-profit Hudson Institute of Mineralogy, which is “dedicated to the discovery, study, and preservation of mineral species and their history, and to increasing public awareness of the mineral kingdom through outreach and education.”

Mindat would not exist but for the contributions made by the thousands of people, from weekend rockhound warriors to PhD geologists, that go to the site and leave behind photos, knowledge and insight into this place we call Earth.

St. David, Arizona, is home to the third most prolific of all contributors to Mindat. With 62 published articles and 24,800 photos, Rolf Luetcke is a font of mineral knowledge. 

Rolf and his wife Mary are the proprietors of Sunshine Gallery & Gifts, located at milepost 296, on Hwy 80, in St. David. The store is a beautifully curated riot of all things natural and collectible.

It wasn’t Rolf’s intent to obtain the “Expert” ranking in mineralogy that Mindat bestows upon the people that it trusts to keep its website accurate and interesting. His parents were hoping for a professor of herpetology, so his initial field of study was in biology at Santa Monica College in the 1960s.

On a summer break from school, Rolf landed an internship at the prestigious Southwestern Research Station, near Portal, Arizona in the Chiricahua Mountains, that was run by the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. 

While there, Rolf developed a device for tracking the movements of rattlesnakes, employing a monofilament fishing line that would unspool behind the snake as it crawled. By this method he was able to trace the nighttime movements of the snakes before the advent of electronic tracking systems.

In 1971, at the age of 22, Rolf took a job working for a public zoo that was run by Howard Hamm on Double 

Adobe Road, not far from Bisbee, on land donated by Phelps Dodge. The zoo was fairly extensive with a population of a couple of hundred animals. 

After his job at the zoo came to an end, Rolf made a proposal to the YWCA of Sierra Vista for a nature program for kids aged 10 to 15 years. On weekends they were given a card with ten things that they were tasked with identifying in the field. 

Participation and enthusiasm abruptly soared when the reward for doing the best job of filling out the card became first dibs on the mineral bag that Rolf’s friend and neighbor, Richard Graeme, the geologist for Phelps Dodge in Bisbee, had provided as a mineral incentive. 

The rock rewards evolved into mineral sample boxes that Rolf created as year-end awards for a job well done within the YWCA program. Soon after, the mineral sample boxes became a business, along with lapidary, tumbling, collecting and polishing all things rock. 

The Sunshine Gallery is part museum, part crafts, part reference library, part samples for sale and 100% fun and interesting. Rolf has the sunny disposition of someone who found his passion and pursued it to the nth degree, and who readily shares what he has learned. 

He teaches as easily as most of us breathe. A true southern Arizona treasure. 

Keith Krizan can be contacted at therealkbkkbk@gmail.com