It takes a lot of momentum to move so much earth.
Four years of planning, $30 million, 9,000 surveys, 650 interviews, board approval, geologist approval, fundraising, consulting, two major donors and very, very high-level security, all pushing in the same direction to shift 1,200 rock, mineral and gem specimens into temporary storage, and then back into a renovated exhibition space.
On April 15, the Coors Hall of Gems and Minerals, a treasured permanent exhibition space at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, will close for an 18-month-long renovation, resetting the a more than four-decade-old display into something that’s more colorful, more touchable and more relevant to everyday life. It will reopen in 2027 as the Dea Family Gems and Minerals Hall, named for longtime museum supporters Cathy and Peter Dea.
“In a lot of ways the stressful part is just starting, because now things are really coming to life,” said Luke Fernandez, co-project manager for the new hall. “They’re not just concepts anymore, it’s got to work.”
Fernandez was hired in 2022 to oversee the overhaul, something that the museum has been inching toward for “many, many years,” he said. “Like, we’re talking decades.”
The exhibit was first installed in 1982, though some of the specimens in the hall have been on display since the museum’s opening day in 1908.
In the late 1800s, word spread about the magnificent collections of Edwin Carter, a scientist who moved to Breckenridge to study the birds and mammals of the Rocky Mountains. Carter was approached by a group of Denverites who wanted to move his collection to the capital for public viewing, and after a year or so of negotiations, he agreed to sell the collection for $10,000.
“The supporters of the museum are by no means all Denver men,” an 1899 gossip column read of the deal to move Carter’s fauna down the mountain. “The hearty support of wealthy men all over the state is pledged.”
Carter died before the Colorado Museum of Natural History opened (the name was later changed to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science), but his collection formed the core of the new institution. And, indeed, the hearty support of wealthy men did start to trickle in, in the form of financial contributions and personal collections, including an early acquisition of bighorn sheep, offered to the museum by big-game hunter Dall DeWeese. (DeWeese later turned his attention to paleontology, donating a Diplodocus fossil that he discovered to the museum, in exchange for excavation costs.)
In 1907, a year before opening, the museum put out a call to the state’s hunters and collectors to help fill out the displays.
Among the first to answer the call was John Campion, a wealthy Leadville mining man with social sway in the high country — he once bought a newspaper and ran for governor, though both bids turned out unsuccessful — whose collection of crystalline gold flakes have been on continuous display since the museum opened. Campion was named the first president of the museum board. “Tom’s Baby,” famously the largest chunk of gold ever discovered in Colorado and also housed in the Gems and Minerals hall, was discovered in one of Campion’s mines near Breckenridge.
“How do you clean something like this?” Fernandez said, pointing at paper-thin gold flakes from Campion’s collection, spread out in a blue velvet display case. “I keep going back to how delicate this whole process is, it really is.”
The new exhibit hall will have a dedicated space for gold — “gold is a crowd-pleaser,” Fernandez said — and will keep the hall’s “biggest hits” on display, including Campion’s gold flake collection, Tom’s Baby, the bright red Alma King rhodochrosite crystal that greets visitors in the current exhibit, and the 10,588-carat topaz once owned by Salvador Dalí.
The museum will add a new silver display and expand the “crystal grotto” and Alma King mine replicas into more immersive environments (people want “to feel more underground,” Fernandez said, referring to community feedback surveys).
They’re also swapping out roughly 1,200 pieces of what will be a 1,700-specimen exhibition, refreshing the collection with new acquisitions, loans from other institutions and pieces from the museum’s inventory that have been tucked away in storage units for years.
While the display is on hiatus, the museum will tour some of its specimens around places like the Denver Gem and Mineral Show. Anyone who visited last year’s show will have gotten a sneak preview of the new display, including “basically the finest specimen of amazonite,” Fernandez said of a blue-green and gray mineral found in the Pikes Peak region. The recent acquisition, which will be on display in the new hall, is known as Smoky Hawk King. “You know it’s a good specimen when it has a name,” Fernandez said.
But the renovation is about much more than resting the rocks and giving collections teams a chance to clean them up.
The big idea is to make the exhibit more relevant, by showing how minerals are used in everyday items and in our bodies, and by pulling historical mining displays — full of sepia-toned photos and rusty pickaxes — into the present day.
“This is all very traditional, these museum display cases, categorized by their chemistry. It’s not terribly accessible to people who aren’t geology nerds,” Fernandez said, gesturing at the current display. “We want to make minerals relatable to you, to our everyday lives, and be able to explain why they are so important.”
Some of the contemporary mineral issues that they won’t touch: energy generation and exploitative mining practices abroad.
“We can do anything but we can’t do everything,” Fernandez said. “I try to think of it in terms of that. And this exhibit, it’s about the local community, giving them something to really be proud of and to really relate to.”