Colorado’s oldest rock shops date to the 1970s, a time that stirs nostalgia and visions of an open road and a changing America. These were stops along the way. Stops to escape social and political strife for little worlds of Earth’s wonders.

They are still that. Take, for example, The Rock Hut, which Jim and Irene Witmer opened in 1974 in Leadville to proudly represent the town’s mining heritage above 10,000 feet. Now the shop is in the hands of their son and daughter, who fondly recall childhood treasure hunts in the local hills.

“That sort of backfired on us,” Dan Witmer says. “The shop got too busy in the summer so we couldn’t go rock hunting as much.”

The shop is still busy in the summer, catching the eyes of both the curious and crazed walking along Harrison Avenue. Inside The Rock Hut, they’ll find gems and minerals of the world. They’ll find fossils too — most recently parts of a mosasaur alongside prehistoric fish and birds.

Also, they’ll find the hand tools they need to go out and do what the pioneering prospectors did.

“People still go out and gold pan,” Witmer says. “Oh yeah, people still got gold fever.”

They’ve got the intrigue that has gripped people throughout time. It’s an intrigue told by the cultural and metaphysical aspects of some stones and crystals.

Of everything inside San Juan Gems in Cortez, those aspects are favorites of the owning Sanchez family. The shop website lists quartz, jasper, amethyst and more for healing. The site also lists dinosaur bones and much more — a collection expanding since the founding days of J.B. Sanchez in the ‘60s. His son, daughter-in-law and grandson continue cutting slabs, smithing, polishing and collecting in his honor.

“He had a love of rocks and rock hunting that would not go away,” they write on the website.

That love never went away for Tammy Girardot. She had a rock tumbler as a kid. Now she has a shop: High Country Gems and Minerals, a staple in Glenwood Springs since 1971.

“When people ask us about rocks, we say, ‘Do you want the geological or metaphysical?’” Girardot says.

And so the shops are places to get a down-to-earth education and to also expand the mind. They are places to find the first item of your collection and just the next one for your world-class stash.

Goes the billing at Nature’s Own, another family-owned store in Breckenridge opened in the ‘80s: “We have something for everyone, from the amateur rockhound to the serious collector.”

At High Country Gems and Minerals, experts have called the seven-pointed star geode “a miracle.” It was brought to Glenwood by a former shop owner named Patti “Rock Star.”

“It’s like a little museum here,” Girardot says.

As it is at The Rock Doc, the unmistakable, red-roof hub off U.S. 285 between Buena Vista and Salida. For 50 years, the Doc has treated obsessives with Colorado’s signature treasures: aquamarine, smoky quartz, amazonite, fluorite and topaz among them.

“Come see what the world is made of,” goes the motto.

You can do it inside the shops, or you can do it outside. As Witmer did as a child around Leadville between busy summer days at The Rock Hut. He still goes out whenever he gets the chance.

“It’s fun to find stuff,” he says.