If it can’t be grown, it must be mined.

That’s the message Adrienne McElwain hopes to share at the annual Colorado Springs Crystal Festival. As the organizer, she enjoys educating others on just how much we rely on rocks and minerals in our daily lives.

“Learning about how we get those natural resources, how we can safely continue to mine, how we can continue to use those resources without trading the Earth, and also what we’re using, so we can understand,” she said.

This weekend, the show will return at the Colorado Springs Event Center. With more than 30 vendors, the expo will host miners, geologists, rock hounds, crystal collectors and fossil hunters. In addition to raw stones and refined minerals, there will also be several craft vendors who use crystals to create.

This year, McElwain expanded the kids’ corner, adding several more interactive exhibits. Activities include a build-your-own pet rock station, tumbled stone bags, a microscope lab, a fossil dig, a touch table and more.

“Doing science classes with kids is just one of my absolute biggest passions,” McElwain said. “We have a couple coming that owns fossil quarries in Wyoming, and they’re bringing up all the fossils, and they sit and prep them at their table so that kids can see you don’t pull them out of the ground looking like this. We have to do all this work first.”

It’s not just kiddos who are encouraged to learn at the festival, though. There’ll be educational displays across booths, and several resources for rock-hunting trips around Colorado and the West.

The festival has grown quite a bit since its beginnings. McElwain started the festival 14 years ago with several friends who made art with stones and crystals. At the time, it was just a trunk show in Utah. Now, McElwain puts on shows like these across the country.

Admission to the show is free, which is important to McElwain so that its more accessible, especially for parents with curious kids.

“We have so many people that come that say, ‘My 9-year-old keeps rocks in a bag and we don’t know what to do.’ We just absolutely love getting those families that have no idea where to start. They don’t know what they’re looking at and they just want help identifying, we’ll sit down, take baggies and label them all for them. We’re happy to do it.”