Price’s newest rock and fossil shop.

After years in Salt Lake City and an interlude in Oregon, Kathie Chadbourne settled on Price as the location for her new rock shop, Sticks, Stones, and Dino Bones. Price was appealing to Chadbourne from the beginning because it’s already rooted in geology and archeology. 

“It’s very grounded in the Dinosaur Diamond,” says Chadbourne, “so at first I worried that they might already have something like this.” But her location was perfectly chosen, and despite local interest, there was no other shop like hers. 

As part of an initial advertising campaign, Chadbourne wore a t-shirt with the slogan “Price needs a rock shop.” People expressed their agreement, and as soon as it opened in September, the flow of customers began. Chadbourne offers a geology class on Thursday evenings, taught by local fossil expert Matthew Angeve Smith, and from the first session it was packed. 

“People love rocks in Price,” says Chadbourne, “and I’m around people every day who are collectors … The fact that the shop is doing so well so quickly shows that it was needed here.” 

What both Chadbourne and her customers love the most are the artifacts that bring distant times and distant worlds to life. “It’s amazing when you can take something in your hand,” she says, “and know that that was a living creature, a piece of history that might be 50 million years old. I’m so excited to share that with kids who come into the rock shop now. I’ll say, ‘hold out your hands,’ and place this twenty-pound bone in their hands, and they’ll marvel that they’re holding a dinosaur bone. I have starfish and blowfish too, and now I have meteors that have fallen from space, and even moldavite, which is like glass, but it came from a meteorite that crashed into the earth. Then you’ve got a little piece of something that came from outer space! There’s nothing like it when I have something like that in my hand.” 

For Chadbourne, this love started out with shells and seaweed on the beaches of Florida. “They sparked an interest in me in another form of art,” she says. When her family moved to Utah, her enthusiasm expanded. “As I was coming through Zion [National Park], I could not believe the landscape,” she says. “I just fell in love with it and started picking up rocks. As I get older my appreciation for the beauty of the earth becomes so in-my-face being in Utah. You look out any window and see the mountains or the desert. You look down and you see the incredible little stones that come out of the anthills. I’ve found turquoise in anthills!” 

This love for beauty is her driver now, and the cliffs in Price enchant her. She described hurrying to a good vantage point after every heavy rain, hungry to go soak in the view of the newly-shining cliffs. 

Even though Price is in a location with so much natural beauty, and with so much interest in geology and fossils, some people were still surprised that Chadbourne wanted to settle there. Why, they asked, didn’t she open her rock shop in Helper, the adjacent town with a population of fine-art painters and a main street full of galleries? Their assumption was obvious: That’s the place for people who care about beauty, not here. But it’s important to Chadbourne that interest in the arts be supported in Price as well. 

“Helper is Helper,” she says, “and I love it … but Price needs its own image of artistry,” she declared. She spoke with enthusiasm about businesses and events that are already growing, bringing the community together and infusing it with interest in beauty. 

To support this, she’s hanging residents’ art pieces in her shop and selling them with no commission fee. In the galleries in Helper, the painters have well-established careers and many works of art sell for thousands of dollars. 

In contrast, Chadbourne’s mini-gallery is meant to give people the confidence to show their art for the first time, and the opportunity to make their first-ever sale, something she’s already seen happen. She’s opening a coffee bar to encourage congregation and renting out rock-polishing equipment so that everybody who’s interested can get involved. The geology class she hosts teaches about the Price area and the nearby San Raphael Swell, and directs people to good locations to find their own rocks and fossils. 

Chadbourne would be the first to stress that she’s not the only one working hard to bring Price to life. “They want business here, and they want people to come,” she says, “and this is an open opportunity in so many ways. I want young people who are trying to open up a business in Salt Lake to just come and have a look at Price.” After telling me about all the fun she’s having, she concludes with a contented, happy tone: “This is where I’m going to end up.”

Feature Image: Kathie Chadbourne at her former rock shop, From The Ground Up, in Salt Lake City. Photo by Braden Latimer.