Down to Earth : Jurupa Mountains Cultural Center’s Directors Teach Visitors the Love of Nature

Sam and Ruth Kirkby have been married for 55 years.

Instead of sending flowers or love notes, though, they exchange fossils, geodes and gems. And in an even more unusual show of love, 28 years ago they solidified their bond by establishing the Jurupa Mountains Cultural Center in Riverside, where they still are teaching others respect and responsibility for the Earth.

“It’s been exciting to watch them take a vision from the bare ground and build it into a place where children and adults alike can learn about nature,” says Judy Nieburger, a Moreno Valley council member and friend of the Kirkbys for 30 years.

Their creation is a foothill oasis along California 60 teeming with olive trees, natural springs, botanical gardens, wildlife sanctuaries and life-size replicas of eight dinosaurs. Learning facilities include a children’s shopping center, Earth science museum, fossil shack and mining office.

The Kirkbys also conduct field trips to the Riverside Cement Co.’s Crestmore Mines, one of only three sites worldwide where more than 150 different minerals can be found.

“We’re not a park, we’re an educational center,” says Ruth, a nationally recognized paleobotanist for whom several rare plant fossils have been named.

But that doesn’t mean that learning about nature can’t be fun at Jurupa.

Weekdays, children can make Indian pictographs, build birdhouses, polish gemstones, dig for the bones of prehistoric creatures or participate in one of about 40 hands-on programs. On Saturdays, families can drop in for a rock-collecting trip among the dinosaurs or for a program in the fossil shack on collecting, preparing and labeling fossils to take home.

Still, it’s the people at Jurupa--unpaid directors Sam and Ruth, their 10-member staff and scores of enthusiastic volunteers--that make the Earth’s history come alive.

Leading a nature walk to the dinosaurs, Sam, 81, is able to push back the horizons of time by thousands, even millions of years. He tells his listeners that they can simulate the conditions of early Earth by setting out a pan of water for a few days until algae appears.

“Then one day, when that little algae was growing,” he says, continuing his story, “a little bug began to wiggle on this Earth. Our Earth was rock, but he wanted to make mud, and he just wiggled and wiggled, and he could have been called a tricycle. But man called him a trilobite.”

To convince his audience that this tale is not make-believe, Sam adds: “This story is just like ‘The Three Little Pigs.’ You ever hear it? Sure! But this story is true. It’s real. It’s part of our Earth.”

Sam seems to work wonder and magic wherever he walks. He stops in front of a half-ton boulder of magnetite. On the surface are rusty, crooked nails that dance and dangle like graceful ballerinas.

“This rock can erase a computer disk or stop a clock,” he says of the lodestone’s magnetic powers.

As the group tramps up the hill toward the dinosaurs, Sam instructs hikers to repeat the name of every mineral they hear. “You want to be smart, don’t you?” he asks. “Why, that’s the greatest thing in the world.”

Sam breaks down every mineral into terms his amateur geologists can quickly grasp. Graphite isn’t a rock, but the lead in pencils; blue calcite is the cement in driveways, and fluorite is the cavity fighter in toothpaste.

Once his collectors realize what’s underfoot, they set off in a mad scramble to fill up their egg cartons with a dozen specimens of the earth’s treasure. For a brief span, the glittering fool’s gold in pyrite and the twinkling purple crystals in amethyst outrank Nintendo and Ninja Turtles in a child’s chain of importance.

Sam then tells the history of the dinosaurs--the ones that were real and Jurupa’s eight replicas made of burlap and Elmer’s Glue.

“When you’re making a dinosaur, it comes right from the heart because they were real,” he says.

Ruth is usually in the warehouse museum by 5 a.m., cataloguing and labeling fossils for sale or use in classes. Her latest task is supervising the sorting of 30,000 ammonites from England.

“If we get 600 children in here a day, that means we need 600 specimens alone,” she says, leaning against a mahogany-stained drawer brimming with ancient teeth and bones of alligators, armadillos, crocodiles, mastodons, oreodonts tortoises and turtles.

“This is the history of our Earth,” she says, holding a Golden Horn coral from the Pennsylvania Period more than 250 million years ago. “How can you tell about the Earth from just the chemistry? Our Earth is a living planet. It isn’t a dead planet flying around in space.”

Dinosaur-watchers might recall that Ruth gained nationwide attention in 1989 with her fight to overturn the U.S. Postal Service’s decision to issue a stamp of an apatosaurus incorrectly identified as a brontosaurus.

Although unsuccessful, she and Sam did add to their reputations for scientific accuracy.

“They teach the fundamentals of geology at an age when most people don’t hear about it,” says Don Stierman, associate professor of geology at the University of Toledo. Stierman is studying many of the Kirkbys’ teaching methods to help train other teachers in the natural sciences.

“They teach why we need rocks,” he says.

Ruth traces her fascination with rocks to her honeymoon more than a half century ago when a ranger in the Smoky Mountains identified a rock she picked up as a garnet, her birthstone.

“From that moment, I was hooked,” she recalls. “In every cut of the road, I’d look for the glamour of the granite and the sparkle of the schist.”

But it wasn’t until the early 1960s when a teacher complained that there was nothing for children to do in Riverside that Ruth--then working as the director of educational services in San Bernardino--started laying the groundwork for what would become the Jurupa Mountains Cultural Center.

With a $10 donation from the Glen Avon Women’s Club, she organized a program called “Searching Nature’s Trails” and began going from school to school giving talks on natural things you might find in your own back yard. Eventually, the Kirkbys deeded over land and houses for the construction of the small nature center.

Today, Sam and Ruth are still giving nature talks. Only now they are inviting the public to share their love and explore their expanding back yard--104 acres of some of the Earth’s best-kept secrets.

Doing Jurupa * The dinosaur and rock collecting program begins at 9 a.m. every Saturday. Cost: $2.50. The children’s fossil shack opens at 10:30 a.m. Cost: $3, which includes a fossil to take home.

* All weekday programs require advance registration.

* In summer, the center offers a six-week nature school for children 6-12. Sessions include hiking and survival, biology, dinosaurs and fossils, Indian lore and rocks and minerals. Cost: $50 per session. Advance registration required.

* For more information, call (714) 685-5818 from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The center is closed Sundays and Mondays.

* To get there: Take the Riverside Freeway to the Pyrite exit and follow the signs. The Jurupa Mountains Cultural Center is located at 7621 Granite Hill Drive, Riverside.