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    Over 24K pounds of Wyoming Jade moved Friday

    Last week, two Wyoming Jade boulders weighing ~24,300 lbs all together were moved from Riverton to their new home in Red Canyon.

    These two remnants were left from the Majestic Jade Rock Shop that once existed on the 1400 block of S. Federal, and are thought to have come out of the Gas Hills in the 1960s, according to their new owners David Freitag and Nachalo Faris.

    Jade is one of the lesser discussed extractive minerals from Wyoming in recent years after the industry slowed down in the 1980s. “Wyoming Jade to be some of the finest nephrite in the world,” according to the Wyoming State Geological Survey

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    David has owned a rock shop south of Lander since the early 1990s. He and Nachalo have spent the last 6-ish years buying and selling jade. These two boulders now adorn the landscape of their business, Cedar Forest Rocks & Products. There are no saws large enough in Wyoming to cut these two, shared Nachalo.

    Their weights were taken as they were lifted by the crane and weighed in at ~12,700 lbs and ~11,600 lbs. The heavy lifting was done by Eagle Crane out of Lander, along with hauling help from Jayson Mitchell at Great Divide Towing and Recovery.

    Interested in learning more about the history of jade in Wyoming? Click here to check out a #Lookback post.

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