President’s Message – January 2024

Presidents Message

From the Top of the Rock Pile .   .   .   .   .   .

I thank our membership for electing me as Club President for another two years. I am so looking forward to what 2024 holds for our club.

We have a great group of members who have volunteered for the Board and various 2024 Gem Show positions. I want to extend a personal thank you to each of you.

After a long search, we have filled two essential volunteer positions. Alex Williams has volunteered to handle our YouTube channel. We will once again have new content posted to our channel. Jim Cerenzie is very active in searching out and preserving our club history. If you have any history, please get in touch with Jim to see if he has a record of it.

Our young Tumblers Club is active. Hopefully, more of our Young Tumblers will decide to participate in the club and earn Rockhounding Badges. If you are active in the badge program, the CMS will buy you a rockhounding vest for badges and field trips. I am still looking for a Mom or Dad to volunteer to help me with the program.

We have closed out 2023 with a membership of 145 families or 288 individuals — a recent milestone for our club. Welcome to our club, and I hope you renew your membership for 2024.

Thank you to Roger Danneman for his excellent job leading our field trips every month. Our field trips are one of our most attended club events.

Our monthly meeting attendance continues to grow back to the pre-pandemic levels. Since we have a growing membership, I hope more of our members decide to attend our monthly meeting. The larger our meeting attendance is each month, the easier it is to book quality speakers.

I look forward to seeing everyone at our January meeting.

Kat Koch, President

Updated: January 5, 2024 — 7:44 pm

Presidents Message

  • Digging It!  Thanks to everyone who came to the club camp out at Teanaway campground near Cle Elum last month. After a brief spell of rain the first night, we were blessed with sun, clear skies, and rockhounding the rest of the weekend. And a big thanks to Roger Danneman for doing all of the trip organizing, and keeping us all warm and well fed during the weekend. This month I’ll be giving a talk at our club meeting about how to use Gaia for rockhounding. If you have specific questions, please bring them along or feel free to email …

Meeting Announcements

  • Noelle Barnes will present Using Gaia for Rockhounding, an overview of the features and tricks associated with the app Gaia and how you can use it for GPS, saving waypoints, navigation, photo tagging, trail recording and more. Show and Tell: Bring the rock(s) that have the best “story” – and tell everyone how you found them and where!

  • Club board member Paul Ahnberg will talk to us about the impact of wildfires on our lives – from protecting your home to staying safe while out rockhounding – and what we can do today to help mitigate our risk. Paul will combine his knowledge gained from learning at both the WSU Green School (Master Gardener) and WSU Climate Steward programs. Show and Tell: Bring something you found, from a place that you know has since been impacted by floods or wildfires – or was impacted shortly before you arrived. Tell your story!

  • December’s date and time is coming soon. We will update this page as soon as we know more.

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