My curiosity about the earth began in a tiny valley in northwestern New Jersey -- West Milford, my hometown. In the forests, purple rocks sparkled with white crystals, and I would split open little rocks atop my “table” of a glacially-deposited boulder in the backyard to look at the gleaming crystals inside. My hometown was an important center of iron mining in Colonial times, and just a valley to the west, in Franklin and Ogdensburg, zinc miners discovered dozens of unique species of fluorescent minerals, minerals that glow bright colors under ultraviolet light! When my family moved to Florida the rocks weren’t so cool, but sinkholes opened up under my high school and I figured I needed to know more about that phenomenon as well.

While Sinkholes was the first book I started to research, Earth’s Hidden Treasures was my first book written, and I filled it with all of the neat little tricks that a beginning “rockhound” would want to know. It was the first in the five-volume Exploring Planet Earth series, which can be found in schools and libraries around the country, and can still be ordered through Amazon.com. Each of the books focuses on a single facet of earth science and within it, the relationship between human history and the earth. Four of the five volumes are my former name, Sandra Downs.