My family loves to “treasure hunt” By that I mean, throw us on a beach and we’ll beachcomb for hours. Lead us into the forest and we’ll spend an afternoon hiking through the bush, stopping to look under logs, rocks and anything else covering the forest floor.
Living in the great Canadian Shield (and many of us do) provides my family with a great opportunity to treasure hunt for beautiful rocks and minerals. From the beautiful limestone shores of Kingston, Ontario, to the hematite of Bancroft, Ontario, the “nickel belt” of Sudbury, Ontario, and the diamonds of the Northwest Territories, you can find so many of these treasures in your own backyard.
Earth Day 2013 is fast approaching (April 22nd). To celebrate, DK Canada sent me a copy of their Smithsonian Nature Guide: Rocks And Minerals – The World In Your Hands.
We were super excited to receive this book. We love to go rock and mineral hunting in our area. The National Capital Region is full of great places to find some pretty spectacular rocks and minerals.
Look what my boyfriend found during one of our outings to an area in Quebec about 1/2 hour outside of Ottawa:
I had seen crystals like this in museums before, but I’d never seen such a beautiful specimen just sitting there in the forest waiting to be found. Well…not really. My boyfriend had to dig through a big rock pile to find the crystal. Guess what was hiding in that rock pile? POISON IVY! My boyfriend was thrilled he found this massive crystal. He was NOT thrilled about the poison ivy that invaded his body for weeks later. Nasty!
The crystal is our best find to date, however, we have found all kinds of great rocks and minerals on our treks. Problem is, we couldn’t always identify what we found. Now we can! With our DK Canada Rocks And Minerals book we can pretty much identify any rock or mineral we find. The book is jam-packed with gorgeous, close-up photos of rocks and minerals, including a brief history and description of each one. There’s even a small section about meterorites – a “find” that is on our bucketlist!
Something I love about this book is the introduction section. It covers topics such as identifying rocks and minerals, collecting rocks and minerals, equipment, organization, storage, cleaning and more. Although it’s full of information, Rocks And Minerals from DK Canada is still compact enough to be carried in a knapsack for easy reference in the out of doors.
On to the best part! The great folks at DK Canada have offered one lucky Canadian Blog House member the chance to WIN their very own copy of Rocks And Minerals! Here’s how you can enter to win:
CONTEST IS OVER
