When I was growing up, not far away, at the wooded end of a regular suburban street there was simple plain building set into the woods surrounded by a parking lot (always empty when we went there) that was a company that supplied things to science classrooms around the country. One thing this company put together for classrooms was various rock samples, for Geology classes I guess. Some Saturdays my Dad would take my brothers and I there to a secret treasure place he knew about (because he supplied things from his company to them). This was a group of unassuming piles of rocks beside the building, their "waste" rock piles, where they dumped what they didn't want to use for those collections. Chunks of Mica (that you could peel off in sheets), rose quartz, gray rocks studded with garnet jewels, various fossils, amethyst, barite rose, petrified wood, feldspars, gypsum, jaspar, shiny black obsidian, bright chunky squarish silver galena and fool's gold are some of the wonderful finds we collected searching in those rubble mounds. These things were real treasure to us kids, and we all had collections. And of course, we were all motivated to learn to identify our finds...