FERGUS — Ken Dardano never imagined his passion for rock collecting would turn into today's crystal empire when he launched his business, Gneiss Guy Minerals and Fossils in the early 90s.
The Quebec-native credits his dad, who worked for Caterpillar Inc., for giving him the rock-collecting bug, having taken him and his younger brother on business-turned-road trips to quarries when he was eight or nine years old.
"We'd be in open pit quarries, underground, my father would carry us up the ladder to the dump trucks and we'd collect rocks while my dad did business," said Dardano.
Fast forward to 1990, Dardano launched Gneiss Guy Minerals and Fossils, selling self-collected crystals from Canada at shows with his brother for the first five years before they went international, bringing back minerals in their suitcases.
"I like all the minerals. When I started collecting, I collected fossils and then the minerals were everywhere so I started collecting minerals and crystals," said Dardano. "It just went kinda crazy from there."
Thirty-five years later, Gneiss Guy is the largest crystal wholesaler in Canada, travelling to 15+ shows a year across North America, in addition to operating its main warehouses on Gartshore Street in Fergus and another in Tuscan, Arizona.
The company currently collects rocks and minerals in places like the Madagascar jungle, Morrocco, Peru, the Sonoran Desert and India as well as in Canada, in areas like Bancroft and Madock.
Some customers even call him the 'Crystal King of Canada.'
"I always say it's a hobby that went crazy ... it feels like I'm Indiana Jones without the whip," said Dardano, who estimates he spends about 50 per cent of his time out of the country on digs.
While he doesn't have exact numbers, Dardano said he has thousands if not a million crystals, minerals and fossils currently in his collection. Their top seller? orthoceras fossils, an ancestor of the modern-day squid that comes from Morroco and is often found in a black or brown marble-like material.
Dardano's personal favourite find is the green apophyllite, which he first discovered in a village well in India about 40 feet deep in a cavity called a vug, where the crystals grow in the rock.
"So we set up a tripod with a bucket and we went down the village well ... it was one of my first times in India collecting and I kept thinking what if this caves in and they just find my feet peeking out of the rubble," said Dardano.
When he started the business, Dardano said approximately 10 per cent of his customers were people who believed in the spiritual properties of crystals: that number is now closer to 70 per cent.
They also sell a lot to museums like the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Science North and the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, which is their largest customer.
"I always get asked if I believe in the healing properties of crystals ... I always say maybe 20 years from now science will catch up and find there's a lot more to the minerals and crystals than we know," said Dardano, using the discovery of Uranium in pitchblende as an example. "I tell them to keep an open mind."
In Centre Wellington, Dardano said the Elora Gorge, which was like the Great Barrier Reef 350 million years ago, is a nice spot for collecting minerals like calcites in quartz crystals and fossils like trilobites and giant bivalves, a "super rare" type of giant clam that were believed to be "all picked off" in the 1800s by settlers but still can be found today if you're lucky.
"Spring is the best time for hunting because the frost brings them (the fossils) up," said Dardano. "So when we go into the Elora Gorge, sometimes you find them out in the open just on a ledge because the frost shifted them upwards as the snow melts."
In the future, Dardano said he's "always looking for something new" and is working on developing a site in Madagascar where a new type of yellow fluorite has been discovered. Gneiss Guy is also planning on building a new warehouse in Peru and Montreal and is looking for a space in Europe.
While typically wholesale only, the Gneiss Guy warehouse in Fergus will be open to the public for a week starting March 22 to March 29.
Isabel Buckmaster is the Local Journalism Initiative reporter for GuelphToday. LJI is a federally-funded program.