Recent Events

INthe last month, there have been several places you might have caught us folks from Michigan Rockhounds. Cody Wiedenbein has become a local celebrity. In addition to hosting several smaller classes around the state on topics of rockhounding and Petoskey stones, he has been interviewed by TV news broadcasters and invited to fancy museum galas where I can only imagine he has been puttin’ on the ritz and hobnobbing with the elitest of the elites, talking rocks over champagne and caviar. Autographs available upon request. Our two big events to start the year, though, were our Leland Lodge kickoff to the rockhounding season, Rock Out!, and our annual Rockport Fossil Tour.

At the Leland Lodge, we hosted four classes covering the topics of Leland Blues, Michigan’s History, How to Tumble your Stones like a Pro, and How to ID Rocks and Minerals. I won’t speak to the quality of the presentations since I am extremely biased, but I will toot the horn of our enthusiastic audience. An audience who showed up with notebooks— and not just to hide their sudokus. Folks were taking notes! We were thrilled and we hope everyone there got a lot out of the experience.

A week later, we hosted our annual Fossil Tour at Rockport State Recreation Area inside the old limestone quarry. Not only did people have a blast, but amazing things were found. A trilobite was finally found and the trilo-bounty collected. Normally that would have been the day’s amazing find, but one attendee opened up a block of shale to discover a pristinely preserved armored scale from the local placoderm (armored fish), Protitanichthys Rockportensis (that’s right, the extinct fish is named after Rockport) that grew to over six feet in length. This piece was stunning. Filming it all was a crew on behalf of Facebook who are making a short documentary about our amazing group and what we do. I've heard that most of the film crew also left Rockport with pockets full of rocks and fossils!

We hope you’ll join us for future eventswe always have a ridiculous amount of fun. Check the upcoming events section!