And unlike the mucky work of gold panning or the industrial smelting needed for silver, sapphires can be found in an afternoon of gravel washing.
Angelique Hervo was visiting from Nantes, France, when she took an afternoon to try her luck at the mine. After four hours of practice, Hervo mastered the trick of nesting sapphires.
And sure enough, when Hervo flipped over her screen box, four glasslike beads sat in the center of the gravel, shining in the sun. Further picking though the gravel uncovered two more.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever tried this,” Hervo said. “We don’t have this kind of thing in France.”
Sapphire hunters pay $14 a bucket for a supply of gravel. The method is to throw a few handfuls of gravel into a foot-square box with a screen bottom. Take the box to a water trough and soak it, pushing it up and down a few times to evenly distribute the sediment. The up-and-down motion also makes the dense gemstones sink to the bottom of the screen.
Then rock the box side to side, letting the water push the gravel into a bar in the middle of the box. Turn the box a quarter-turn and rock again, making a new bar. Do this correctly a few times and all the sapphires will clump, or nest, in the middle of the gravel pile.
“They’re like a diamond, but with rough edges,” Hervo’s Missoula host Dylan Landais said. “We weren’t expert shakers, but we found them.”
Staying in the sunshine is important, if sweaty. Gem Mountain owner Chris Cooney said one of the most productive places to find gems is in the gravel underneath the shaded tables. Cool but careless searchers often sweep away the baubles with the wash water.
“One guy found a nearly 3-carat stone in the gravel on the way to the office,” Cooney said. “He just saw it on the ground.”
Inside the office, lines of dusty miners waited for Gem Mountain staff to inspect their finds. Hervo handed her plastic film canister to a young woman seated by a powerful lamp and a tiny dish. The woman poured the canister of stones into the dish and added some bottled water to rinse them. Then, one by one, she held them up to the light.
Hervo came away with two high-quality stones weighing 2.93 carats and another 28.96 carats of smaller or flawed sapphires.
The sapphires come from an open-pit mine about three miles from the public area. Cooney brings gravel from the pit by the dump truck load - after a minor bit of deck-stacking.
Because Cooney sees Gem Mountain as much an entertainment activity as a mining operation, he samples every gravel pile before bringing it to the work site. There’s no way to predict how the sapphires will be distributed in an alluvial deposit that’s been shaken and stirred by Mother Nature. Cooney lays out each one-yard load in a long line so he can easily test different parts of the pile.
“I use these for staff training,” Cooney said as he set two film canisters on his desk. “These came from the same pile, one from the left side and one from the right.”
One canister held 10 gems. The other had 40.
The goal is to have each bucket contain about 9 to 10 carats of gemstones. But one week in early August, customers were bringing in 20 to 25 carats a bucket. Last year, Gem Mountain visitors dug into a jackpot of 3-carat stones. This year, has been more irregular, with hot and cold weeks.
“Some days Mother Nature gives away way too much, and other days it’s not enough,” Cooney said. “But I know about 50 percent of my revenue comes from repeat customers. I never want to operate a tourist trap - the market is just way too small.”
And the market of customers contains an odd mix as well. Many are tourists looking for one more experience between Glacier and Yellowstone national parks. They’re happy to buy a few buckets and wile away a vacation day on a treasure hunt.
And then there are folks like John Sadeeky of Arlington Heights, Ill. Last week, the aircraft mechanic was spending his fourth or fifth annual week at Gem Mountain (he’s lost count), working his way through about 250 buckets of gravel.
Sadeeky springs for the 50-cent full-length plastic apron, which makes him look a little like a grocery store butcher as he wanders from table to table seeing how others are doing. He’s happy to share his box-washing technique with anyone who’s looking frustrated, and will also contribute some of his smaller stones to a youngster who hasn’t caught gem fever yet.
“I’m mainly looking for stones over 3 carats,” Sadeeky said. “Today, I’ve found about seven I would keep. I’ve yet to sell a single one, though. It’s just fun.”
In Gem Mountain’s early business incarnations, it was mainly dedicated rockhounds who made the journey into the Sapphire Mountains. While some hunters are highly experienced (and occasionally competitive) gem hunters, Cooney said he’s aiming for a more relaxed, family-friendly atmosphere.
The mine started as a public operation about 40 years ago under ownership of Missoula’s Chaussee family, which also owned Chaussee Jewelry. In those days, diggers would hike up to the open pit and fill their own buckets for sifting. It passed through a couple more owners and a brief period as a private commercial sapphire mine until American Gem Corp. bought the property in 2000.
Cooney got involved as an environmental engineering consultant, helping the operators clean up some water pollution problems at the mine. He said American Gem tried to reopen the mine as a public dig in 2000, but had to shut down after just 41 days. That was the year the Skalkaho Complex of fires torched much of the Sapphire Mountains in one of Montana’s worst-ever forest fire summers.
So Cooney took over the operation the next year, and quickly found himself “so flat broke I couldn’t leave.” But he persevered, making friends with former owners and miners who showed him how to improve the business. He added a free camping area for recreational vehicles and built a special furnace for heat-treating customers’ gems.
The furnace clarifies the stones at nearly 1,200 degrees centigrade. Gem Mountain does not use chemical additives that can make a stone unnaturally bright or colorful. Nevertheless, some heat-treated stones turn out in dazzling tones of blue, orange, yellow and red. It costs between $50 to $200 to treat a batch of stones, depending on number and quality.
One thing Cooney has to watch for in the heat-treating process is chips of quartz or garnet. Those minerals melt in the furnace, binding the sapphires in what he calls “furnace turds.”
If the customer wants, Gem Mountain can then send the stones to a Chinese faceting firm that will cut and polish the sapphires into classic gems. Cooney follows a multistep identification process to make sure each customer gets back exactly the stones he or she sent in. The process takes a few months to half a year, depending on how late in the season the customer’s stones are sent in.
“Some days, people want to cut every flawed stone they find,” Cooney said. “A lot of our Montana visitors just save their stones as souvenirs. Others are always looking for better stones for their collections. In September, we have lots of folks show up, buying buckets of gravel for the winter, for home hunting.”
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)