ON THE ROAD
SEARCHING FOR EARL NEESER
BY BOB BEERS

The first trip I remember up U.S. 95 from Las Vegas to Reno was with my junior high school jazz band. UNR was famous in those days for a jazz festival produced by its music department that drew top middle and high school bands from around the country to compete, swap stories and learn new tricks.

From that earliest trip, I always wondered what lay at the end of the road near Goldfield marked "Gemfield 4 miles." Finally, on a trip home from UNR, Sarah and I decided to stop in and find out. We must have looked a little funny, bouncing along this desert road in our "poor college student SUV" - a Ford Pinto.

We got to the end of the road and found a dilapidated trailer with a rusty metal rocking chair out front. A crusty old guy named Earl Neeser was working on it. Earl lived at, owned and operated Gemfield full time. He explained that we could pick up as much of his rocks as we wanted for fifty cents a pound.

His rocks, gathered from the hills nearby, were colorful jasper and chert - stuff geologists call "scilified banded rhyolite." Jewelry makers all over the world used Earl Neeser's rocks as semi-precious gemstones, sometimes as the central part of a piece, other times as filler material to highlight something more precious. 

He spoke of shipping boxes of it to the orient to fulfill orders that came from overseas - the hard way, before there was an Internet.

When we explained we were broke college students, and that the last $10 in our possession was destined for our gas tank, he nodded understandingly and sent us on our way with some free samples, and a card with his mailing address, a P.O. Box in Goldfield. It was the first Nevada rock I ever collected.

This year, we decided to see if old Earl was still haunting Gemfield. The highway sign is still there - "Gemfield 4 miles" - 2.4 miles north on U.S. 95 from the defunct, but still majestic Goldfield Hotel. 

Once off the highway, several left turns at several forks in the road lead you to Gemfield - 3.2 miles in.

We didn't find Earl; in fact, we didn't find anybody. We found an abandoned residential trailer - it might have been the same one, but I couldn't swear to it. Someone had nailed a hand painted sign onto it, instructing visitors to put $1 per pound of rocks into the "Honor System Box," which stood nearby with its lock and lid missing.

We drove the dirt tracks that are now open through the hills around the trailer and admired the unusual and colorful rocks, and even brought a few home ... and wondered whatever became of old Earl Neeser. LW