Lewis and Clark made their return trip from the Pacific Coast to St. Louis, Missouri in 1806. They retraced much of their 1804-1805 route. The Discovery Expedition of St. Charles did the same. This meant that I was once again crossing Montana. Another summer in this state gave me more opportunities to explore for gems and minerals.
This time we decided to visit Crystal Park in the Beaverhead Dam National Forest and Alder Gulch near historic Virginia City. Crystal Park is a quartz collecting area on public land. Alder Gulch produces gem quality reddish brown garnets. Both locations are easily accessible and have convenient amenities for visitors.
Our first stop was Crystal Park. Even with all of the camping equipment we were carrying for the Discovery Expedition, we had nothing for digging stones. A quick morning stop at a hardware store fixed that. We purchased a short shovel and a gardening hand trowel. A screen would have been useful, but one was not available at the hardware store.
I had heard that the best opportunities for finding good crystals were at the top of the hill. From the bottom, it was not very obvious where the best diggings might be. However, the top of the hill is completely covered with pits from hopeful miners. Now it was just a matter of choosing a spot to dig or re-excavate as most of the surface had already experience some level of digging.
The top of the mountain at Crystal Park
Being very clever, I chose an area in the shade. Initially I found a few small crystals on the surface. Then I began to dig with the shovel and sift through the soil by hand. This spot did not produce very much as my system was very slow and inefficient without a screen and bucket of water.
After lunch, I chose another spot further up the hill. My luck did not change. Eventually I became satisfied that I had given a good effort and decided to walk around. It was really an amazing site to see just how much of the hill had been dug. Only a few trees desperately hang on to what unmolested soil remains. I even saw a man digging a hole deeper than he was tall. His dedication certainly runs deep! Next time I would come completely prepared for an all out assault on the soil. With only a meager find, is was time to proceed on down the trail.
This hole is typical, but did not produce any riches
The last stop in Montana for gem hunting was Alder Gulch. There are several known garnet collecting localities in this area. Most of them require you to have your own equipment. After the Crystal Park experience, I knew that I was not properly equipped to explore a do-it-yourself location. Instead, we decided to visit the Red Rock Mine, a privately run garnet “mine” along highway 287 west of Virginia City.
The Red Rock Mine
There were two options for getting the gravel to wash. The easiest was to buy gravel that had been dug from the gulch across the highway from the Red Rock Mine. The other was to dig your own from a dry wash on the property just adjacent to the washing stations. This was the option I chose.
Sieving gravel
The sieve provided worked very well to separate the larger stones and sand from the gravel of appropriate size. I dug and sieved while Mom washed and screened. This worked for a couple of hours. After a while, I was able to sieve much faster than wash and screen. The washing and screening process was exactly the same as that used for finding sapphires. It is also possible to find gold in this gravel as gold is what made this area important in the first place. We did not have time to try our luck with gold panning.
Screening concentrates the garnets toward the center
The "eye" of garnets in the screened gravel
After a good half-day at Alder Gulch, we had collected a few hundred carats of rough stones. Some of them had quite nice color. Admittedly, some of our biggest and best stones were found in the piles of gravel that other prospectors had left behind on the washing tables. Nonetheless, we were able to collect enough stones to have about 200 carats of cuttable rough. I even found a ruby crystal in one of my buckets of gravel collected in the dry wash! I would later have these cut on one of my many trips to Thailand.
Alder Gulch tie tack
Both Crystal Park and Alder Gulch are fun to visit and it is easy to find at least something for your efforts.
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