Last day of the trip

We got in last night about 7:15 PM after a fun morning looking for sapphires. Yesterday, we didn't do much, other than drive the 10 hours from Hill City SD to Helena MT. This morning after a Holiday Inn Express breakfast, we drove about 25 minutes east of Helena to the Spokane Bar Sapphire Mine. We saw this on a TV show, Cash and Treasures, so we decided to test our luck.

It's a small place but when we got there, we were the only people. We bought a bag of concentrated dirt to sift through. The owner showed us what to do to find the sapphires. First of all, we put a small amount in a screen and then put it into the water that they had. You shake it up and down and with a rocking motion. The sapphires are heavier than the rocks so they should settle to the bottom of the screen, if you do your shaking right. Rylee was a natural at the shaking part.

Once you are done shaking the screen of dirt, you bring it back to the table, put a pad of foam over the top and then turn the whole thing upside down on the table. This way the rocks are sitting on the foam when you remove the screen. You can then look for the sapphires. They are easy to spot once you know what to look for. They look like pieces of glass that you can see through a little bit. The bag that we bought took us about 2 1/2 hours for us to go through. We picked out the easy pieces and then had to go through the rest of the dirt slowly to make sure we didn't miss anything.

After we were done, we took our find to the office and they told us what we had. We ended up with a total of 63 carats of sapphires. The biggest pieces were a little over 4 carats each. We can send them in to a person that cuts and polishes them to see if we have anything of value. He said a 4 carat rough stone can be cut down to about a 1 1/2 - 2 carat finished stone. In the picture below, the big round thing is a dime, the rest are sapphires.

We had a lot of fun doing this but the kids got a little tired of going through the fine stuff. Once they found the biggest pieces, they were ready to move on to another screen. We did decide to buy another bag of the Eldorado dirt that was dug from the same area that we got the first bag. The Eldorado B bag is from an area where they are getting bigger sapphires and we thought since we don't do this very often, we might as well go for the big ones. We also purchased a screen so that we can do this batch from home.

By the way, Rylee found a special present from her grandpa in the dirt we were going through. She's still not exactly sure how it got there but here's a picture with the proof.

We're glad to be home but we had a great time. We definitely want to go back to the Yellowstone area. Both Jill and I were really impressed with Yellowstone and can't believe that we've waited so long to go there. I know it won't be that long before we get there again.