Paul Broste Rock Museum

We finally got to the Paul Broste Rock Museum.  It was well worth the $5 charge for the tour.  Mr. Broste built the building himself -- its concrete block with natural stone from the area on the outside face.  He made his own equipment to make all the polished spheres that are housed here.  Some of the spheres are the largest of their kind in the world.  Perfect polished clear quartz, tiger eye, rose quartz and the list goes on and on.  He collected from all over North and South Dakota and then went on to acquire rocks from all over the world.  There are also stalagtites and stalagmites from caves which are now illegal to collect. 

There was this beautiful piece of wulfenite from the Red Cloud Mine near Yuma, AZ.  We had met the caretaker of the Red Cloud Mine and we displayed a piece of wulfenite at the refuge.  This rock is amazingly valuable because of how rare it is.  The reddish orange color wulfenite is only found in two places in the world.   The museum curator had no idea that the wulfenite they had on display was valuable.  She told us that several of the rock specimens they had were worth over a million dollars and the Smithsonian had tried to get a few of them.    We looked around at this old building and thought --- they need a better security system!