Every October, the indoor arena at Cross Hollow fills with tables of glittering specimens, trays of cabochons, and the low hum of collectors haggling over slabs of petrified wood. The Fall 2026 Cedar City Rock & Gem Show runs Friday, October 2 through Sunday, October 4 at the Cross Hollow Event Center's Diamond Z Arena, and admission is free. Doors are open 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, though the visitor bureau's listing summarizes the daily window as 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Either way, the point is the same: come in, wander, and stay a while.
The show is put on by the Southern Utah Rock Club, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that serves as a hub for the region's rockhounds. Today the club is a member of the Rocky Mountain Federation of Mineralogical Societies, the umbrella body that ties together local gem and mineral clubs across the intermountain West.
That institutional backing matters less to the average visitor than what's actually on the floor. The show promises rocks, minerals, fossils, jewelry, and beads, along with exhibits and live demonstrations. Vendors bring lapidary equipment, finished jewelry, and mineral specimens, so the range runs from a child's first polished stone to serious collector material. There are silent auctions and grand prize drawings, and the club stages its own ultraviolet mineral display, a tent where otherwise ordinary-looking rocks glow in startling colors under UV light. The club even publishes a brochure about the display for visitors who want to understand what they're seeing.
Families are a big part of the draw, and the organizers lean into it. Children's activities include rock painting and a set of low-cost games with names like "Rock, Rock, Who's There," "Rocko," and "Rock & Roll," each of which sends kids home with jewelry or rocks. There's also a rock-hounding sand table where children dig up free specimens. A first-person account of a past spring edition of the show described the kids' games as a dollar apiece, with children walking away with bags of rocks, fossils, and gems, some of the prizes donated by vendors. The same account noted food vendors on site and reported that proceeds from vendor donations went back to the club.
The venue itself is a piece of local character. The Cross Hollow Event Center sits just west of Cedar City and consists of two arenas: the indoor Diamond Z Arena and the outdoor Iron Ranger Arena. The outdoor arena measures 160 by 300 feet with bleacher seating for up to 2,500. It is, in other words, a rodeo and equestrian facility for most of the year, which makes the annual transformation into a hall of minerals and gemstones all the more striking. Note that the address is sometimes listed as 11 N. Cross Hollow Road and sometimes as 11 S. Cross Hollow; both refer to the same Cross Hollow complex.
The club behind the show keeps busy the rest of the year. It runs monthly rockhounding expeditions across the region and beyond. Members operate a club-owned lapidary shop in Cedar City and can take classes and workshops in lapidary work and jewelry making. Meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, in Cedar City during even-numbered months and in Hurricane during odd-numbered months. No membership is required to attend a meeting, and the club's stated mission is straightforward: educate members and the community about rocks, minerals, and other geological materials, and encourage mineral study, collecting, lapidary, and jewelry making as a hobby.
Southern Utah is red rock country, and the geology underfoot is the whole point.
For anyone who has never been to a gem and mineral show, the Cedar City event is an unusually easy entry point. There's no ticket, no capacity limit, and no expectation that you know a bixbyite from a septarian nodule. You can spend an hour or an afternoon, watch a demonstration, let a kid dig in a sand table, and leave with a pocketful of rocks. The Fall 2026 show opens Friday, October 2 at 10 a.m. at the Diamond Z Arena, 11 N. Cross Hollow Road in Cedar City.