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About the Author ---------------- Garret Romaine is an energetic writer and rockhound from the Pacific Northwest, having authored Gem Guides for both Oregon and Washington. Born in Spokane, he earned a geology degree from the University of Oregon and a geography degree from the University of Washington, and he currently teaches technical writing at Portland State University. He has earned numerous journalism and technical writing awards in his career, and continues to dabble in technical journalism and technical documentation when he's not writing field guides. Garret is equally enthusiastic about gold prospecting, fossil hunting, and rockhounding, and is even starting to dabble in meteorite hunting. He was a reader and user of Gem Guides titles long before he wrote his first book, and credits his wife Cindy for giving him a copy of the first edition of Gem Trails of Oregon in 1989. He still has that dog-eared edition, full of hand-written margin notes. Little did she know that years later he would updated that title for its 3rd edition. He wrote for the Gold Prospectors Association of America (GPAA) for 15 years, producing nearly 100 articles for the "Mining the Internet" column, and he still publishes occasional articles there. He is a current or past member of some of the larger gold prospecting clubs in Washington and Oregon, and stays current on the region's legal issues. He is also a member of the North American Research Group (NARG), a thriving club of fossil hunters. That group conduct frequent "search and rescue" operations to secure paleontology specimens before erosion and weathering take their toll. In 2010, Garret was named to the Board of Directors for the Rice Museum of Rocks and Minerals in Hillsboro, Oregon, and in 2014 he was named Secretary. He is active in social media, and you can find him on Facebook. Read more ( javascript:void(0) )