Shae Loecke (11) has been collecting rocks since he was ten, but his hobby really took off when he received his first rock polisher three years ago.

“The polisher really made me see the hidden beauty of a lot of them because they always kind of look boring until you polish them and get rid of the surface layer,” Loecke said.

Loecke has so many rocks he sometimes finds some around his room he forgot he had. 

“Honestly, I really don’t do a lot with them,” Loecke said.

He keeps some with him, gives others away, and sells a few polished rocks at the farmers’ market.

“I really like giving them to people and selling them so they can feel what I feel about them,” Loecke said.

Loecke does believe that rocks have certain qualities and properties that other people, like his friends, collect them for, but he collects them because they look cool.

“I think they’re pretty, and it’s really cool that these beautiful lumps of rock just formed somewhere in the Earth hundreds of years ago and now they’re just mine,” Loecke said.

His favorites are cat’s eye, mermaid agate, and peacock chalcopyrite. Loecke finds his rocks at the old dam or along the river. When he can, Loecke goes to crystal shops and buys unpolished or rough rocks to take home and polish.

“I like the ones that are kind of a cross-section of a bunch of different ones. I have one where there’s jasper, agate, and a different type of quartz all going together,” Loecke said. “It looks super cool.”

Loecke said that in the future if he could open a rock shop or work in some field that worked with more interesting rocks, then he would be “perfectly happy.”

“I know a lot more about rocks than your average person, but another thing that’s fun about it is that there’s always so much more to learn about them,” Loecke said.