LARAMIE - Dee Spaulding's house will never blow away. It's too full of rocks.

You could call Spaulding a rock lover.

"You can never have too many rocks," she said while standing next to a bucket full of them on a ranch near Encampment.

On a recent field trip with the Cheyenne Mineral and Gem Society to hunt for copper, quartz crystals and garnets, Spaulding, of Fort Collins, Colo., filled her bucket quickly while looking through a pile of waste rocks from a nearby copper mine.

She'd even neglected her own rule as she picked up copper-studded specimens: to make sure you head for the car before you fill your bucket so you'll have room for all the rocks you find on the way back.

Nearby, Steve Marsh of Cheyenne, who used to work at a mine in Colorado, stumbled upon one of the best finds of the day while walking through a stand of sagebrush. He looked down, saw a flash of reflected light, and found a quartz crystal as thick as his thumb and smooth as still water. Giddy and laughing, he tucked the crystal into his shirt pocket for safe keeping.

"If I looked for more of them I wouldn't find one for a hundred years," he said, smiling.

Crystals are the rocks Bob King gets excited about. Don't even ask him about, say, gold, because he's not interested.

"Maybe it's the mathematician in me," King, a retired math professor, said. "I just like the structure."

When he moved to the area a few years ago, he heard rumors about a rancher from Encampment who had a great mineral collection.

"It took me years to track this guy down," he said.

It turned out that the rancher, Ralph Platt, 95, used to work a copper mine on his property that also happened to be full of quartz crystals. Platt was more interested in crystals than copper, to the disappointment of his father, until a man from the East Coast came and purchased his collection for more money than the copper was ever worth.

The mine is now closed, but the waste rock dug up and dumped out on the sagebrush is prime crystal territory for amateur rock hounds, and they come every year.

"It's one of our best trips of the year," King said.

More than 20 people made the trek from around southeast Wyoming and northern Colorado.

Sheryl Remmels of Loveland, Colo., found a couple nice specimens after a few hours of digging. She would loosen an inch of soil with a shovel and run her gloved hand across the dirt.

"Anything with a face, you've got to look at," she explained.

King scoured a nearby area looking for graphic granite, which has a distinct texture. Find that and your chances of finding a crystal nearby are good, he said. After finding a promising outcropping with a few teaser crystal pieces sitting right on the surface, he started digging.

The vein gave out, but not without a few small finds that a novice reporter found to be quite attractive. As well, the reporter got a taste of the lure of rock hunting, where that next sweet find could be one turn of dirt away.

"It's a disease," Andrea Bennet of Loveland, Colo., said.