Byline: BILL GLADSTONE

BY BILL GLADSTONE IN THE LONG Trailer, a 1954 movie comedy, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz traverse a picturesque mountain range in an enormous trailer.

Concerned with negotiating the treacherously narrow mountain passes, Desi tries to keep the vehicle as light as possible. Lucy, a fanatic rock collector, secretly fills drawers, cupboards and every nook and cranny of the wheeled abode with rocks. Eventually, Desi finds the hidden rocks and tosses them away, with appropriate curses in Spanish.

Rockhounds, you see, are dedicated: witness their mass arrival last weekend at Bancroft, Ont., for the town's 22nd annual Rockhound Gemboree. So great was the influx that there wasn't a hotel or motel room vacant within 60 kilometres of town.

Bancroft, population 2,400, is situated in Ontario's so-called mineral belt, where more than 80 per cent of all the minerals found anywhere in Canada can be found. Feldspar, beryl, corundum, diopside, tremolite, hornblende and uraninite are only a few that have been located in the region, which is fraught with mines (many still operative) and numerous shops that send mineral samples to customers worldwide. "It's a rockhound's paradise here," said Sue Morris of the Chamber of Commerce, which sponsored this year's Gemboree, the largest commercial mineral and gem fair in Canada. "The geology around here...