Meet Jim Reed Jeff Schimel | 7th Grade Media Teacher in Brainerd, Minnesota / Professor of social psychology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta.

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jim Reed Jeff Schimel and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jim Reed, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
That is a great question. It never really started out as a business. We met back in the 1990s when we were both living in Colorado. Jeff was working on his Masters Degree and Jim was teaching fourth grade in Manitou Springs. We dug casually when we had time and got hooked on the idea of finding cool gems and minerals. We both ended up moving away from Colorado and pursuing our professional careers. As time passed, this little app called Facebook came onto the scenes. We had long since lost contact with each other but we both made trips back to Colorado to dig on others claims and dig on unclaimed areas. Just by chance, we found each other on Facebook and reconnected. We both shared our finds over the years. We both had this desire to take collecting to the next level and get our own claims to work on. As we started to find stuff together and our collections grew, we decided maybe it was time to transition from our professional jobs and start a mining business we could work at once we were both fully retired. That is how 2nd Generation Mining was born. Through hard work and perseverance, we now have a few claims and we are permitted to use a machine on one small area on one of our claims. Over the next couple years we hope to become a larger player in the mineral world.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Jim has been a classroom teacher for 33 years. He has taught everything from k-12 to graduate programs for a university. This experience dealing with 100s of personalities a day has helped him become flexible and has taught him how to overcome difficult situations while taking everyones interests to heart. The job has also taught him that anything is possible. From winning the prestigious Samsung Solver Tomorrow contest to learning how to float balloons around the planet, the one thing that it always comes back to is to never give up and always put your best foot forward. He has always tried to instill this in the students he sees on a daily basis. He also tries to live this daily in the classroom helping students see their full potential.

Jeff: I have been a professor of experimental social psychology at the University of Alberta for the last 22 years. I received my MA in experimental psychology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS) and my Phd in social psychology at the University of Arizona. I have spent my career designing studies to investigate what drives people to behave the way they do. Specifically, my research has sought to understand how existential threats such as uncertainty, death, and social isolation affects people’s need to pursue meaning, self-worth and to defend their cultural worldview. I have published numerous research articles on this topic. I am very proud of this accomplishment. However, as I inch closer to retirement, I have been longing to spend more time on ‘my land’, the Colorado wilderness near Pikes Peak.

I developed a love for gem and mineral collecting in this area when I was doing my graduate work at UCCS in Colorado Springs. It was there I met Jim, who introduced me to mineral collecting. Jim Invited Ray Berry, president of the local mineral club at that time, to give his 3rd grade kids a geology lesson. Afterward, Mr. Berry gave Jim some advice on where to go prospecting. Jim called me up and invited me to give it a try. We spent a day out prospecting near Lake George, Colorado at a location widely known to local collectors as Quartz Hill. Long story short, after very little success that first day, we eventually dug in a small prospect hole made by a previous digger. The hole stretched under the roots of a large tree. We hit some hard rock with our pick and then peeled back a large chunk of it. To our frenzied delight, hundreds of single jet-black smoky quartz crystals spilled out into our laps. We were hooked!! From that day forward, every free day was spent prospecting in the mountains. For many years digging crystals remained a fun hobby for Jim and I. Now, we feel as though the time is right to turn our passion for hunting buried treasure into a career. We have spent the last 7 years slowly building our mining business, which includes prospecting, mapping out new areas that look promising, acquiring claims, and applying for permits. After finally getting our first mining permit, we spent our first summer prospecting with an excavator in 2021 and we got our buts kicked. Half way out to the claims on a sketchy forest service road, the excavator broke down; the drive line had a catastrophic failure. To add insult to injury, the next day, we got word from our credit card company about some suspicious charges. Come to found out, someone hacked our company card and made $3500 of fraudulent charges. We had no excavator, and no money. Needless to say, we were depressed and defeated. Out of desperation, we looked up an old friend, an experienced miner in the area, who gave us access to an excavator for a week. Luckily, we were able to find some decent material and salvage our first mining season, though not without great effort and great cost. Now that we have a little experience under our belt, and are a little wiser, we’re ready to try it again next summer. Our goal is to recover some of the really spectacular mineral specimens that the Pikes Peak Batholith has to offer and bring those treasures to collectors who love these rocks as much as we do. Wish us luck!

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
We would invite them to come dig with us for the week. We would provide them with a sandwich and an opportunity to discover something never before seen.

In all seriousness, when we are back on Colorado and working our mining location, we spend the majority of our time back on the claim since we are limited in time. When we are back from the mountains we love to celebrate a good find by eating at one of the local Mexican restaurants in Woodland Park, Fiesta Mexicana, or the best pizza place in town, AJ’s Pizzeria. We have friends and family come out and visit on many occasion. We like to point them to the Cog Railway. This is a scenic trip tot the tops of Pikes Peak on the famous incline train. We also like to point them to the many hiking trails in the Pikes Peak region. Lastly, no trip is complete without a day in Manitou Springs working the cool streets and visiting the famous penny arcade. But the prime attraction is being out in the mountains on our claims mining the treasures of the Pike’s Peak Batholith. It is not for the faint of heart though. The roads that lead out to the claims are rugged jeep trails and the weather can change in an instant. Although the mountain terrain is unmatched in its beauty, it is also rugged and unforgiving when things go wrong. One must be prepared for anything. The most common problem we face is lighting storms with hail and flash flooding.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
There are so many people that have helped us along the way. One of the first would be a gentleman named Ray Berry who was instrumental in teaching us what to look for and where to look in the Pikes Peak region. Another family that has helped us a great deal is the Dorris family of Pinnacle 5 Minerals. Joe has been both a mentor and a great friend. He has always been there for us when we needed guidance navigating the world of mining. He is a wealth of information and is open to sharing with us the knowledge he has gathered over the years. Lastly, would be our supportive families. Without them and their faith in us, we would still be trying to figure out how to make it all happen.

Website: http://2ndgenerationmining.com

Instagram: jimreedcollecting / jeffschimel

Facebook: JimReed /