Born and raised in the northwest, Lars W. Johnson’s passion for absorbing geologic beauty developed early when the family took a trip south to Portland, Oregon, just in time to catch Mount St. Helens erupt in 1980. Decades, and countless rockhounding trips, later, Lars opened a retail rock shop and organized many fieldtrips, inspiring enthusiasm and inclusivity to those new to rockhounding and a renewed curiosity for locating, collecting, and sharing experiences that seasoned rockhounds could appreciate. A blog quickly spawned to share his accumulated rockhounding information (LarsRocks.com) and exploring, writing, mapping, and cataloguing became his focus. Lars belongs to several rockhounding clubs, including TheNorthwest DiehardRockhounds.