We love rocks. And fossils. Dinos too. Caverns, mines, and gold panning. Earth treasures are everywhere and we love finding them, viewing them, and exploring them.

We’re also campers and love spending weekends and holidays enjoying Nature in our travel trailer or tent (we write about those adventures at A Crock of Schmidt). Everywhere we go, we try to do some rockhounding and/or hiking in the wilderness near our chosen campground. Sometimes, we build entire camping trips around visiting a specific geological wonder. Even our non-camping travels often have a geological angle to them, be it a natural history museum or a rock and mineral collection. If there’s an Earth Treasure to be seen, we want to look at it.

Our Vision

Finding these Earth Treasures, however, can be exhausting. We can’t begin to tell you how many hours we’ve spent scouring the internet looking for cool geology attractions to include in our itinerary. The big ones are easy to find, but there are many others that slip through the search engine cracks or are hidden gems known only to locals. And when it comes to more obscure adventures, like gold panning on public panning reserves, finding information can almost be impossible.

Every time we descend a rabbit hole and end up frustrated, we think, “life would be so much easier if there was a single repository of geology-inspired destinations and information on the web.” We’ve been thinking this for well over a decade now and since nobody seems too keen on building one we’ve decided to do it ourselves.

Terra Thesaurum, which means Earth Treasure in Latin, is our attempt to build that destination. A single place where everything from dinosaur museums, mine tours, and cavern tours to rockhounding hotspots, panning reserves, and fee digs are all listed for you to pick and choose which ones you want to visit next. We’ll even toss in some information on adjacent entities like rock and lapidary clubs and retail outlets supplying the geo-hobby space.

This is a work in progress; a labour of love, if you will. Each new entry brings us closer to achieving our vision. We appreciate your patience as we grow Terra Thesaurum in real time. And we hope you’ve found our geodirectory useful.