The Sapphire Mine in The Common Room

Here’s another section of our 1983 trip, which I call “The Great Rockhound Road Trip.”

Leaving Yellowstone by the western gate, we go north and west through Butte Montana and Anaconda to Phillipsburg Montana, named after Philip Deidesheimer, a mining engineer. Silver, gold, lead and copper were mined herein the 1880s and early 90s Most of the mines closed after the Silver Crash of 1893.

We are headed for the Gem Mountain sapphire mine.

The stones here are not large enough to be mined commercially. Instead, they mine the tourists. This doesn’t mean that they’re cheating any one, just that their business is the tourists, not the sapphires themselves.

The business shovels up gravel and puts it in large plastic buckets. For a small fee, one can buy the privilege of examining a bucket of gravel, taking the whole day if desired. Water and wooden tables are provided. Any sapphires (found may be kept.

For a larger daily fee, one may dig for oneself. Equipment can be rented, but we had brought our own. Two holes are dug. The first is filled with water for washing the gravel. The process is to put a partial shovel of gravel in a shallow rectangular box with a screen bottom; squat over the hole filled with the water and swish the screen through, washing the gravel free of dirt. The screened box is turned upside down over a flat rock, with the sunlight angling on it, and dumped there. The sunlight will cause the sapphires to glimmer, giving them a slightly greasy look. They are picked out and placed into a small plastic container which has been supplied.

The first afternoon, I stayed in the car in the shady part of the parking lot and read a book. Husband dug up on the mountain.

He learned several things.

First of all, squatting all afternoon can make you so sore that you need help getting your pants and shoes on the next morning.

Secondly, doing it again helps only marginally.

I went with him the second day. The place was beautiful and didn’t seem to contain any of the live-in-the-grass biters that are so common in the southern climes. I dug a little and washed a lot and examined plenty of gravel. We found a good palm full of sapphires, most of them in a colour I call “cat pee,” a sort of unpleasant yellow-green. (Husband had them heated and many changed to more pleasing colors.)

My major duty was to guard the stones we found. If the little containers are set down, hordes of chipmunks come running out from the trees to see which of them can grab the container and run off with it, spilling the sapphires all over the ground, back into the gravel and dirt. No one seems to know why they do this, but everyone has an opinion, some a little on the wild side.

Having no pockets and knowing that the adorable little animals also ran off with small bags, it was my task to put the newly found stone into the little container (about the size of one of those little plastic cups that come with cough medicine) ,press the top on, and tuck it into my bra. Chipmunks, thank TBTB, have no interest in bras.

In early afternoon, we retired from sapphire mining with enough stones to sell/trade a few, keep a few and for Husband to create a pretty little ring for me as a souvenir of the event.

We’re off to try a hand (his) at opal mining in Idaho.

Last updated February 23, 2016