If the rock hounding goes well on this August day, Adam Neeley will leave the Telluride area with pockets full of rhodonite and green fluorite.

And if he’s particularly lucky, some quartz crystals with rhodochrosite also will find their way into the award-winning jeweler’s possession.

“Telluride and Ouray is one of our favorites,” Neeley said. “One of the big finds when I was younger was finding amazing rhodonite down here. It’s a beautiful pink gem that has veins of silver in it. It’s unique to this area. It’s one of the first stones I started polishing.”

From there, he’ll leave it up to the mercurial gods of sleep, that liminal space where ideas for new designs regularly come to him fully realized in his dreams. His only task is to wake and hold onto the imagery long enough to grab a

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