Spoke at the Rotary Club of Ruidoso - Aug 2026

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    For 28 years, Lori Coleman farmed cotton in the Mississippi Delta. She picked rocks out of the fields along the way, because they threw off the counters on her planters. Today she's a commercial miner in New Mexico known across Western Europe.

    Lori was Tuesday's speaker at Rotary, joined by her husband Bruce. Together they run Spanish Stirrup Rock Shop in Alto, where the rock comes in raw and leaves as art.

    After Hurricane Katrina, Lori decided she wanted to live somewhere she would never see another hurricane — and somewhere she could still pick up rocks. New Mexico had both. She started the business in Deming in 2009 and built her expertise from the ground up, mentored by people in the rock community and now collaborating with New Mexico Tech and speaking at symposiums from a miner's perspective.

    Her specialty is the thunder egg. Unlike a geode, you can't pop one open with a hammer. The shell is rhyolite, a 7 on the Mohs scale, and it takes a diamond blade to cut. When it finally opens, it's the first time anyone has ever seen the inside — in 20 million years.

    That age is important. German thunder eggs run about 120 million years old and come out fractured and fragile. New Mexico's are young and intact, carrying quartz, agate, and opal in white, orange, and blue. Uranium was present when they formed, so the interiors fluoresce green under shortwave light. About one in ten also glow red, where calcite met manganese.

    Lori found and named one of those deposits herself: Lava Cap, now considered one of the finest thunder egg deposits in the world. She's licensed, bonded, and permitted by seven state and federal agencies — the only woman in North America doing this commercially. Every bit of it is mined in southern New Mexico and processed right here in Lincoln County.

    Lori spent years building a reputation abroad. Now she's turning some of her attention homeward, letting New Mexicans know the fame our own ground has earned in the rock world.

    As she put it: "It's wonderful to be able to go to work and do something that's a hobby you love, because then it's really not like a job."

-Rotary Club of Ruidoso