Kristen Fiore
Audio By Carbonatix
When Luke Maas moved out on his own, he decorated his place like a nature and science museum. “I went out and bought meteorites, dinosaur fossils, animal skulls and anatomical arts,” he says. “I decorated with what I was most interested in, which was the sciences.”
Today, Maas’ business, the Golden Curiosity Shop, is decorated much the same way: greeting people at the entrance is a T-Rex replica named Arthur (after Arthur Lakes, the Mines professor of Jarvis Hall, the first person to discover and record a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil. The T-Rex fossil was found on South Table Mountain, just a few miles north of the shop). Inside, visitors will find taxidermy, entomology displays, gems and minerals, books and more for sale.
Maas opened the Golden Curiosity Shop in July of 2021. At the end of June of this year, the store moved to 1218 Washington Ave. in downtown Golden — right next to the iconic “Welcome to Golden” arches. “We’ve had over 1,000 people come through those doors almost every single day since we opened, which is more foot traffic than I’d get in a month at the old store,” Maas says. “That’s what the difference of five minutes down the road does.”
Maas is a sixth-generation Goldenite whose family has been in Golden since the 1860s. His great, great, great-grandfather, Bernard Maas, once owned the German beer gardens in town and was a friend of Adolph Coors. Maas’ wife, Stephanie Ramstetter, has also had family in Golden for about 150 years.
“The intention was always to have my business in Historic Downtown Golden,” Maas says. “…I’m just kind of following in the family footsteps and trying to add my own chapter to the history books, albeit a small one.”
Small or not, Maas’ efforts have a big impact on anyone who walks into the store with a hankering to learn something new. His love of science is palpable and contagious, clearly demonstrated by Maas’ willingness to explain things in the store, including the Newton’s wave pendulum hanging from the ceiling, which Maas built himself over several days in a hot shed.
“By calculating a slightly different length for each pendulum, I can make them gradually drift in and out of sync, creating the beautiful wave patterns you see in my store,” he says. “The math gave me an excellent starting point, but building it was much more hands-on than I expected. Tiny differences in the strings, knots and mounting points were enough to change the timing by a fraction of a second, which becomes very noticeable over hundreds of swings.”
To get everything perfectly synchronized, Maas made microscopic adjustments to the length of the strings, timing each pendulum over 125 swings. “By the time I finished, I had counted well over 10,000 swings,” he says. “It took a tremendous amount of patience, but to see it all come together was worth it, and my customers really love it.”
If the store isn’t too busy, ask Maas for a demonstration. He also has a 400,000-volt Van de Graaf machine, a metal dome that, when touched, will make a person’s hair stand straight up.
The Golden Curiosity Shop’s inventory comes from all over the world: butterflies from Peru, carved skulls from Tibet, ancient artifacts from Egypt. “A lot of the stuff has come from museums that are downsizing their collection, or private museums that have gone out of business,” Maas says. “We track a lot of this stuff down.”
The store has an impressive display of exotic skulls, including a two-headed cow skull named Biscuits and Gravy. “All of them are very carefully curated,” Maas says of the skulls. “We abide by all the laws. Special Agent Lizz Darling with U.S. Fish & Wildlife made the mistake of giving me her cell phone number, so if I have questions, I’ll text her, and she’ll let me know what to do and how to do it.”
Customers will also find two resident axolotls, Watson and Crick. The rare amphibians are named after James Watson and Francis Crick, the men credited with discovering the DNA double helix. “If you’re really sharp on your scientific history, Rosalind Franklin was in there as well,” Maas says. “She was a little fish, and not too unlike history, Watson ate her after about 6 months.”
Kristen Fiore
Seeing the excitement on people’s faces is Maas’ favorite part about running his store, and it’s something he wants to help people rediscover.
“I think everybody is curious,” he says. “We all start out that way. The kids that come in here ask so many good questions: What are dreams made out of? Why is the sky blue? What is the speed of dark?”
At some point, that enthusiastic curiosity is beaten out of people. Maas says that one comment he gets often from adults in his store is, “I think this stuff is really cool, but I’m afraid other people will think that it’s weird.”
But the Golden Curiosity Shop embraces the weird.
“The more I learn, the more questions I have,” Maas says. “I love that. Science doesn’t take the mystery out of the universe; it reveals even bigger mysteries hiding just underneath. That’s what keeps me hooked.”
Visit the Golden Curiosity Shop at 1218 Washington Ave., Golden. It’s open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
