MUD FULL OF SAPPHIRES! - This is how to mine them

Well hello everyone, Dan Hurd with Dan Hurd Prospecting here. Welcome back to my channel. And if you're new, welcome. I hope to earn your subscription today. I am here in Montana. We are doing some sapphire hunting today. My new friend, Hayden, invited me down for a trip. And while I'm in Montana, I've got to go and find some of those great sapphires. Hayden, thanks so much for inviting me down. I'm so excited to have you here man. Wish us luck, and I hope you enjoy. Now my new friend, Hayden, here, he invited me down for an entirely different purpose. Hayden, why don't you explain what it is we're doing. So, well, right now or a little bit later? No, tomorrow. What we're doing tomorrow? Tomorrow we're going to be recording an episode of our podcast, The Bad Country Manifesto. It's basically a show where we explore all sorts of different outdoor pursuits with the goal of getting you guys interested in, I don't know, stuff you might not have known about but are curious to learn. So prospecting was a perfect thing, and there's nobody better than Dan Hurd. And if my viewers want to check out The Bad Country Manifesto, where do they find you? You can find it anywhere you're streaming podcasts. You can check out our website, backcountrymanifesto.com. You can find us on YouTube. Anywhere that you find podcasts, you're going to be able to find us. So, The Bad Country Manifesto, check it out. I hope you like it. Check it out. But now, we're going to go in and see if we can find some of those amazing Montana sapphires. Now, Montana is known for its sapphire deposits. Today, we are at Gem Mountain, just outside of Filtsburg, Montana, and they run a pay-to-dig sapphire mine. Here, they mine the sapphires up in the mountain, they truck them down, they fill up buckets here for the public to sift through and find their own placer sapphires. Not like the hard rock sapphires I was doing earlier this year. Yes, it's been a heavy sapphire year. I've done four different videos on sapphires this year. But today, it's a placer sapphire we're doing. Gemmy, gemmy clear. These are the sapphires that you make actual gemstones that you'd put on jewelry. Beautiful Montana sapphires. Let's go show you how we find them. Now, I think the first thing we need to do is head over to the gravel pile and get some of the pay dirt, the sapphire pay dirt. So, we're here at the gravel pile with the amazing Gem Mountain staff who are about to pick out the best buckets for us today. Which one's the best here? Oh, he's going for the best one. He's going for the best one. That's the bucket for today. Oh, and a little bonus. Nice. Oh, they're getting multiples for us. I think we're getting a special treatment here. So, our personal host here, Alex, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Where is this gravel coming from that we are going to be working today? So, our gravel comes from just on the other side of these bushes here. There's a road that goes up about five miles, and it connects to the actual sapphire mountain range. And you have a mine up there where you're digging this out of the ground? We do. So, it's an alluvial mine, so we only dig about 6 to 12 feet down because anything below that's a hard rock mine. Our sapphire gravel started in a volcano. That erupted, and so all of our sapphires were on the surface of the ground and actually got pulled down here by glaciers. And we should find sapphires in each of these buckets. How much do you think is in roughly? We average about 15 to 25 carats per bucket. With this stuff being as dirty as it is with all that clay, it acts like glue and kind of adds more sapphires to it just because it sticks to everything. So, I've been seeing about 30 carats out of this batch of gravel. About 30 carats of gem sapphires in each bucket. Nice. These are actually some of the ones that I found out of this batch of gravel earlier in the month. Oh. I'll put them on the table. Put them on the table, and I'll pull up the close-up camera to show you. Nice. Wow. And these aren't the best of the best. These are just ones that I most recently got. Hey, Alex, carat-wise, what would you say is sitting on the table here in this pile right now? Anything from half a carat to about 4 carats. And in total, the pile? That, I'm not too sure. Got to be like 500 to 1,000 carats on the table right now. I would guess. It's a pretty large mine. And I think we're going to get these wet and see what they look like. They might look a little bit better when they're wet. Naturally heat-treated. Like I said, they were in that volcano when they erupted. So, that's why most of them are going to be that pale blue stream. So, we actually do heat-treating here on site, which is that little building over there. And that will bring out the clarity as well as the colors. Wow. And your color range here, we've got blues and greens. We've got the odd pink one. Absolute red sapphire is definitely called a ruby, but nothing here is red enough to be considered ruby, is it? We do. It's not very common. We are supposed to tell people that we can't call them rubies because we want to ruby mine. Right. And because they have to be certified by the GIA. Right. So, these are all sapphire. Yes. Officially. Okay, let's find our own. Okay, they have supplied us with two gem sieves, a couple of vials, some tweezers, some brushes. I did also bring my own gem sieve. I think we'll be using theirs for now. But I will explain a little bit later the difference between mine and theirs and why I brought mine along. But I think the first job is to take some of our gravel and fill up a sieve. Okay, am I like... About half full will be good for a start. Okay. We don't need to go crazy. We will definitely take them over to the wash tubs to wash them out. A little more, a little more, a little more. There we go. How's that? Let's go with that to start with. Now, if you're not familiar with gem sieving, it's very, very similar to gold panning, except we're using a little bit different of a pan. This pan here has holes in the bottom that lets the small material through and just grabs on to the bigger material and cleans it up. And then we use the specific gravity of the sapphires, which is heavier than anything else in that gravel, to separate out the sapphires from the gravel. And we're going to do that over in the wash tubs. I'll explain over there why it works. Ooh, we get a bonus? Is it a beard hair? No, no. Oh, it's one of theirs. Yeah, it's one of theirs. I think it belongs to our buddy Alex. Every once in a while when I sell pay dirt bags, someone contacts me and says they found a beard hair in it. Bonus. Right here looks good. Okay. This is great, I can teach you how to do this. That's perfect. It'll be easier than me filming myself doing it. So your first job is to lower that into the water and get everything nice and wet. Just shake it around, sort of side to side, back and forth, almost like you're gold panning at this point. Just, yeah, shake it a little bit. Make sure everything is nice and wet. You can get in there with your fingers and break up any clumps that might be forming. Okay, I like it. And then we want to start getting a little bit more violent. Get it shaken down, broken up, and we'll even start pulsing up and down a little bit. Like this? Yeah. I'm so nervous I'm going to accidentally kick it out. As long as nothing goes over the top edge, you'll be fine. And again, breaking up the clay balls a bit to make sure that any of those clay balls don't have sapphires hidden inside them. You wouldn't want to do that. No, I don't want to lose any sapphires. Okay, now for the next step it might be easier for me to show you rather than tell you. So sapphires are heavier than anything else in here. They will sink down below the rest of the gravel. And when we pulse it, it makes sure that the light stuff is on top and the heavy stuff like sapphires is on the bottom. Then we start rocking it back and forth. And that brings the whole material into a line in the middle here. And the heavy stuff is now on the bottom in a line. And we can pulse it again, make sure this heavy stuff on the bottom, rock it, pulse it. Anything heavy is now in a line right there. If we rotate it 90 degrees, pulse and rock, the line gets concentrated into a spot in the center. So pulse, rock, pulse, rock. And we can rotate it again. Pulse, rock, pulse, rock, rotate, rock and pulse, rock and pulse. And you keep doing that about that much. And anything that's heavy like the sapphires or gold, not that there's gold here, will be centered in the center of this pile at the very bottom. Wow, very cool. But now you don't want to dig through there to find it. We have a trick for that. So now we bring it back to the searching area. And in order to get the material that's on the bottom on the top, we're going to flip it over. I'll flip it. You better do this. You might put the camera on me. I'm happy to. Okay, trick for flipping a gem sieve is to flip it towards you, not away from you. If I tried to flip this that way right now, the camera would wear all of it. If I flip it towards me, I can keep it all in one spot. Now, anything that was on the bottom of the sieve is now on the top of the pile. And I see three sapphires already. And after a quick look, I'm seeing three or four, maybe even five sapphires sitting in the center of the pile here. You can see that one pretty easily. There's one right beside it. There's one buried over there. And I guess the trick now is just to go in the tweezers. And let's grab that one to start with. Sapphire. There's a good one. Oh, too much coffee today. I'm shaking. That's a good one. Let's get that one. Close-up shot of that guy. That's the nicest one so far. Right there. But that's the second one. Dan, whenever I see people doing this kind of thing, I always wonder how they're so confident. How confident are you that most of the sapphires are concentrated? Will you even look at all the edges of this stuff? We did a pretty good job. And you could tell when we flipped it that it was pretty centered in the center. If you were worried that you've lost some along the way, all you do now is you scoop this right back into the gem sieve. You go pulse and rotate it a couple more times and flip it again. And if there was any that maybe got buried under a good rock that you didn't see, they should be right back centered on top. Very cool. I think we did a pretty good job. But do you want to go try and see if there is anything else? Sure. Let me do it. Real quick, I'll come back and flip in one sec. So here we are at the second flip of this same material. Aiden, do you see anything there? I don't know. Let me see. Is that one? Is that one right down in there? That is. There we go. So we missed one the first time. But that looks to be it. How many buckets do we have to go through today? Oh, eight. Let's get going. I would be very interested to make a bucket of the dirt that's already been through. And then put a specific number of sapphires back into it. And see if we can get that number back out. Yeah. I think that would be a really cool test. Okay, so there we go. I'm filling mine up a little bit higher. You going to do one too? Oh, yeah. Of course I am. Okay, Aiden's got the lesson under his belt now. He's going to try one on his own. And I've got mine here as well. Oh, I already see the sapphire. You got a nice one in there. The time consuming part of this is washing the clay balls down. How do you keep it from wanting to like bunch up on one side? After a while, you get familiar with where it wants to go. And you can start tipping the tray in the opposite direction. So what you're saying is be better. Be better. Like right now I'm getting a lot coming to this side. So I'm going to start tipping farther away. Just my action naturally pulls it that way. So I'll tip it away so that it centers it more. That one's good to go. How are you doing? You're going to have to show me how to do the line. I think I'm at a spot where I've got to kind of balance them, right? Okay, it's nicely washed now. Now it's the case of that rocking. When you're doing the rocking, you want to be right on the surface. And you want to rock it hard enough that it all bunches in the middle. You're going to have to show me one more time, Dan. One more time? Right on the surface of the water. I've got water throughout. And then I rock it back and forth until that wave of the water pushes everything into the center. Oh, I'm going to lose stuff. I know I am. Not so good. Rotate 90 degrees. Just rotate the whole thing 90 degrees and try it again. There you go. Now you're getting to the center. Okay. Okay, and then pulse. Okay, and then rotate. Rocking it. Yeah, you got a line in the center. Good, good. Pulse it. Okay, and rotate 90. Rock it so it's all in the center. Good. Pulse. Okay. Now, when you pulse, yeah, it came off to the side. So we're going to rotate one more time and try to pulse it straight the next time. So right now you're kind of lifting the outside edge. You're kind of throwing this outside edge back. Okay. So what you want to do is straight up and down. Straight up and down. Oh, okay, I see, I see. Really use the water to kind of like get under him, I guess. Yeah. Is that good? Like that? Yeah, good. Let's rock one more time. Get in the center. Okay. And then pulse one more time. Okay, let's go see if we can find some sapphires. Time for the flip. And we flip right onto your old pile because that gives us a bit of a cushion. We make sure it's flat. And then we flip. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Nine. Look at the size of that one. Oh, let's get a close-up on that. That's a nice sapphire. Nice. Biggest of the day, although I like the one from earlier better. Nicer color. Well, there's the pile. All green from this one. Other than that big one I pulled out first. It's already in the vial. There's another ten or so smaller ones here. All green. I think it's time to do the next sieve. We're going to have video evidence. Oh, good. Hayden's first flip ever. All right. Let's see how he does. Ready? Three, two, one. Nicely done. It will get easier as you get more of a pile, because you get to kind of set it down into the pile rather than hammering it down and in. Okay. Well, let's see. I don't feel like I did good. I think your center ended up over here. So look over in this area over here for sapphires. Let me help you out one little bit. Look over there for sapphires. Oh, wow. Look at that. There you go. Look at the size of that one. That one's great. It's nice and all your own. Wow. Very cool. And the owner-operator of Gem Mountain just came over to say hi. His name is Chris. Chris, thank you so much. Thank you for being here. Would you like to explain a little bit about what Gem Mountain Sapphire Mine is? Sure. We're in the family entertainment business. Okay. And it took me a long time. I'm a really slow learner, so it took me a long time to learn that. Family-owned and operated, you have an opportunity to do something that's very, very rare, even worldwide, which is buy a bucket of dirt and wash it to find gem-quality sapphires. And there are beautiful sapphires here. Beautiful. We have a very high-quality stone, predominantly smaller sizes, but we have such higher grade than just about anywhere else. Yes. And then I personally, with the help of my wife and daughter, do the heat treating. Heat treating is a very, very specialized process where you control the atmospheric conditions around the stone to go really hot. So, for example, when I turn the sapphires blue, I'm at 1,560 degrees centigrade. Wow. That's warm. Right now, my heat treating furnace is broke. That's what I was working on when you guys arrived. And I'm going to transition from that to going up to the mine to help my guys work on some size distribution problems we're having with our new screen plant, our wash plant. The heat treating darkens the color of the stones, and then we facet in excess of 20,000 stones a year for customers, just like you guys. I'm kind of a failure. As a jewelry store, we build about 10 times more pieces of jewelry, custom jewelry for customers, with their stones than I sell out of the case. And again, I've always operated as a family environment. You know, there's no smoking or drinking out here in the public area. We're here to have fun, and it just makes me smile when I see these family groups together. Everybody's head over the table, like right over there, you know, sharing the experience of a treasure hunt. Absolutely, absolutely. And you have some faceted stones inside that we'll come and have a look at when we're done here? We have a few. I'd sure invite you to go to the store in town, especially if we give them a heads up. You know, that's where the main... This is seasonal. We're only open 64 days a year here. Right. In towns are year-round kind of headquarters, so that's where all the big, good stuff is. Okay. But yeah, we have a small wholesale business. I'd like to expand that. And we sell, again, almost as many gemstones as we do jewelry, and we build a lot of jewelry for people. Awesome. Well, thank you again for letting us invade your operation here. And film. You're a cash-paying customer. Oh, yes. Which I appreciate. You know, I'm really proud of what we pay and our crew and what we're able to do together. It takes a real team effort when you're as diverse as we are from, you know, trying to teach people how to wash gravel to draining the trough on Friday night and shoveling all the muck out of the bottom. Yeah. Well, Alex is taking very good care of us so far. So if you see Alex, give him a pat on the back or a bonus or something. Well, Alex is around. Great team you got. Thank you. I appreciate it. Any questions? You know, that's one of the things when training my staff that I always ask them periodically is ask me a question you've been asked that you didn't know the answer to. Fair enough. Yes. So far, no questions on our part, I don't think. Oh, there might be a lot of questions. We'll work with Hayden for a bit. All right. Okay, time to fill up the silt one more time. Now, one trick to doing this. All the heavies are in the center right here. If I miss any sapphires, it's going to be right there somewhere. So if I grab that center, put it in the next one, flatten out my pile again. Now, anything I miss will be there and it'll be showing up in the next load. Three, two, one. I like the flip part. I feel like the flip part, I kind of got my head around. Sapphires in the center. I got one migrating out and it's a gorgeous one. Beautiful one migrating out to the edge. That's not a bad one. Not a bad one at all. That's fashionable. There's a bunch more in there too. They gave Dan a good dirt. I can see why they don't suggest this technique for neophytes like myself. What technique? The rock technique. Chris alluded earlier to like... Not the technique that... No, what he's talking about is me stacking up flip after flip after flip. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah. The rocking technique is kind of what they... Everybody does. Yeah. They try to get people to do. However, as long as you're just pulsing, you'll get them to the bottom. And then you just search the whole bottom rather than searching just the center. Well, I'm searching the whole bottom anyhow. There we go. That's from this flip. Two fashionable stones in that flip. About 10 stones in that flip there. But I think it might be time for me to just take my whole pile and just go and pulse it one more time and make sure there's nothing else missing in it. And this was out of seven buckets today? This is out of six buckets so far. I got one more left. Excellent. Well done. A couple of pinks. Nice. Yes. I'm just going to take my whole pile here and just do one more quick sieve over there. Make sure I haven't missed anything before I get new gravel. Yeah, there's a few. One, two, three, four. There's a few. Good thing to recheck. Well, the safety flip showed four that I've missed. One okay size, three small ones, one with really nice color. Glad I did a safety flip. Hayden thinks he's got the technique down. Okay, but now I'm going to screw the flip up because I'm thinking about it too much. Oh, you did. Did I? Well, you hit the outside edge before the back edge, which threw everything this direction a bit. So your center, which is this dark material, got pushed over. Oh, but you can tell that I did it right because of the dark material? Oh yeah, you can definitely see the dark material in the middle. So you definitely got a center. It's just the flip pushed it one way a bit. Your sapphires will be in that little area right there. Okie dokie. Another sieve of material to the top. This is the part that always scares me the most. I'm just going to throw them right out. You know, when you're sifting like this, you're actually throwing out hundreds of them. Oh. Anything that is smaller than the hole size is going through and the vast majority of these sapphires will be smaller than that. Okay. But they're too small to do anything with. I don't know if that makes me feel better or worse. I'm not sure if you saw mine over there. I did. I'll put this on camera how it's much smaller. It's meant for diamonds. So for diamonds, you want to get the smallest one possible. So it's got a very, very small hole in it. Okay. Why is that? Because diamonds are expensive and hard to find. Absolutely. Come on over. All right. Beautiful one right there. Another nice one. Nice. There's one that creeped out a little bit over here. Oh, my gosh. And then there's about five right there. But that's nice is one of this flip. It's just great. Very pretty. Beautiful. If you want me to show you how to sift it over there, I'm happy to. If you want me to sift one for you and flip it, I'm also happy to do that. There's two that we could facet here. Yeah, two are facetable. I haven't found any of the real dark blue yet. No, I shouldn't say that. First one I pulled out was a real nice blue color. So as I said earlier, Hayden, about the differences, this is my diamond sieve here for when I was looking for diamonds at the Crater of Diamond National Park. And you'll notice the holes in it are tiny, like less than a one sixteenth of an inch. Where here we have almost eighth inch holes. And that's because when you're diamond sifting, you're wanting to find even the tiniest, tiniest diamonds. Sapphire sifting, it's not a big deal if the tiny, tiny ones go away because they're really not. It wouldn't be worth it. It's not worth it. Yeah, I got you. I could use this for doing this and it would have a whole lot more in it. I'd be interested in seeing it. Yeah, I'll give it a shot. Okay, so using the diamond sieve, it does the exact same thing. Sapphires are heavier than the material. Diamonds will be heavier than the material. They're both going to fall to the bottom. Diamond sieve, just a little tighter mesh. Just means I'm going to have finer sapphires in there to pick through. Oh, there's a sapphire. Okay, I did this better this time. You did better. Oh, look at them all. So you want to see what the difference looks like? See how fine the material is all around? Wow, yeah, look at that. There's 15 of them probably right in there. Holy crap. And you can even see some really tiny ones. Like if you look close, like look at that guy there. He's tiny. Now one problem with having the finer material in here is there's a good chance they'll have a layer of fine material at the bottom and a sapphire sitting on top of it, which is now underneath it. So it might be that I'm hiding some. Look at that guy there. See how small he is? Yeah, look at that. Yeah, tiny. Like these ones over here. Yep. Very tiny. A ton of them, but tiny. And using the finer screen, we have some tiny sapphires in there. Let's see if I can zoom in on one. Tiny. Dan Hurd, LeBron James of prospecting. Almost missed the biggest. Did you? Yeah, it was underneath a layer of that fine stuff. See, now I'm at the point where I'm just trying to sabotage you. That's a good one. Check it out. Wow. That's a fast little one. I almost missed it. That's because I tried to sabotage you, man. Yeah, I see how you're working. That's a pretty good load this time around. That's a beauty. One fastable in there. Well, a lot of these smaller ones are fastable. We could make gemstones out of a lot of these, but that would make a beautiful one. And you can really see the dark ring in the center. The heavies are always darker, so you always get this dark ring of heavies right in the center. And if you see a dark ring, you know you've done things right. You're doing a great job for someone who's just doing this for the first time ever. Okay, again, we'll grab out the center. And another sip. Hayden's ready for another? I am. I am almost ready for another. Oh, sure, let's go for a big one. Can I get it all in? I won't lose any. Everyone's cheering for Hayden. He just had a great flip, got a perfect center, and some beautiful sapphires. Yay! Beautiful. And there's still a couple good ones in here. Well, you know, you taught me. Well, Dan taught me, but you gave me the confidence to go forth and conquer. Nicely done. He's getting it. See, it wasn't that bad to learn, was it? I mean, it was not easy to learn. Well, I don't know. The most fun things are never easy to learn. Oh, I just flipped it. I got a beauty pink. Look at how bright that pink is. Wow. There's a couple of good ones. There's one over here. There's this guy. This guy migrated out to the edge, and he's gorgeous as well. There's that big pink right there. But look at the pink. Where did you pick up your buckets? We had them choose good buckets for us. I guess so. Look at all the sapphires and a pink. Let's get a close-up on that. Okay, there's the pink of the day for sure. Pink sapphire, beautiful. Hayden just pointed out there's a couple of green ones there, but... Oh, where is it? There's another pink. It's not as good as the first one. The first one's a gemmy. But look at these things. Love it. Beauty pink. That is a facetable blue. Where's another pink one? There's another pink one. That other pink one may have been a garnet, actually. I don't know if they've got garnets here, but it just has that shape and look about it that might be a garnet, not a sapphire. Oh, not many in this one, but they were quality. So that big pink one's probably a garnet, not a sapphire. So that guy's definitely a sapphire. And no, it's not red enough to call it a ruby. Anything that is even remotely pink is a pink sapphire. It has to be red-red before we can even consider it might be a ruby. Now, as I said before, we're able to find sapphires by sieving like this because sapphires are heavier, denser. They have a higher specific gravity than the rest of the gravel around them. And that's why they sink through and fall on the bottom of the sieve. But another neat thing about sapphires brings me to today's geology lesson of the day. Sapphires, corundum, and its hardness. Sapphire is the second hardest gemstone out there. You know, I know everyone knows diamond is the hardest. It's a 10 on the 10-point scale. Sapphires are a 9. Now, that scale is not linear. Sapphires are about a quarter the hardness of diamonds. Diamonds are freaking hard. But sapphires are the second hardest gemstone. And I think there's a couple minerals that are harder than sapphires, softer than diamonds. But gemstones, sapphire is the second hardest out there. It's a 9 on the Mohs scale. There's today's geology lesson of the day. Okay, Hayden wants me to sift his pile one more time and see if he lost anything. I think he's been doing a really good job of it. I'm glad one of us thinks that. So, I don't think I'm going to find anything. But, let's see. Okay, here's Hayden's. Re-sift. Uh-oh. Oh, my gosh. I saw it through the screen. You saw it too, yes. So, as it turns out, I do suck. Only two. One of those nine. Oh, three, four. Okay. Well, get picking. Four empty buckets. Let's go back for four more. We got the special deal today, the buy six, get one free, get a seventh free for $240. The people of Gem Mountain were very, very kind and gave us an eighth. Okay, we're back for four more buckets here. And Alex is nowhere to be seen. So, we have a new shy employee who will not be on camera. But she's going to pick out the best for us. We know it. There we go. She chose the four best for us. Loaded in sapphire. Come on. Don't be wimpy. Fill it up. You can do it. There you go. One, two, three. Hey. Oh, man. Is that one? That can't be. Oh, my gosh. Look at that one. Nice. Wow. Nice. How'd you do? Not so much. There's a few. Now, this one is way smoother than a lot of the other ones. Washed more in water at some point. So, really round. You get some right round ones here. Sapphire being so very hard, it takes a lot of river running to actually smooth it over. So, that's why most of these things are jagged to some degree. Because there's nothing that will abrade away a sapphire. Sure. Not as many in this load, but that one has great color. Two more. Ready to go. How do I look at this one on top? Oh, wow. Yeah. Pretty great, man. How painful is it for you to watch me do this? It's great. I love it. I love watching people learn something new. I had it, and then I just totally screwed it up. Oh, that's a great one. Oh, and that was a good one. Oh, that was a good one. This is great fun. I'm having a great time here today. Look at all these sapphires in this one. This one is loaded. And one really nice one. Oh, yeah. That's a nice one. Well, that was a good one. Loaded. So, being a redhead, I typically work in the shade whenever possible. But I just came out here into the sun to do a flip. To see what these things look like in the sun. And, boy, do they glow. Really, if you're here doing this, grab a table in the sun. Get some sunblock on. That is definitely the way to do it. So, we just emptied the last bucket. And the last flip of mine was pretty pathetic. There are a couple sapphires in here, but not like what the last one was. I got some ideas of things we can still do here to have some fun, though. Oh, here comes Hayden. Are you done? Oh, no. I got half a bucket. Okay. Oh. I see one. Oh, there's one. Oh, look at that one. Oh, you know what? This was actually a significantly better bucket. Okay. I just redid the top of the pile here. Haven't even looked at it yet. Let's see if I missed any. Did I miss any? Oh. Hey. I'm good. Of course. Of course I didn't miss any. Yeah, that's it. Look at that. Okay. Now, for fun. Chris, the owner, when he was here, said that underneath this shelter, people miss a lot of sapphires because there's no sunlight, and they just scrape them onto the ground. I want to try grabbing a pan, a sieve, full of just ground material and see if there's any sapphires in it. Let's see if anyone lost one. Okay. Ground sweepings. Flip one. Oh. Sapphire. Two of them. Really? Just a second. Yep. Two sapphires in the ground sweepings. I don't know if that's allowed here. No one stopped us, but I don't know if that's allowed. Okay. We definitely saw the two on top, but there's actually a really good one in here. Check out the pink sapphire. Wow. There we be. The floor sweepings. Okay. Floor sweeping showed us something fun. Hayden, what's next for fun? Well, now we're going to do the tailing of shame. Dan is going to get through all my tailings here and show me all the sapphires that I missed. I'm sure that there are- Two. That's what you're going with? I'm going with two. I'm going to say six. I had three in my first flip. The second flip didn't have any, so I'm saying you got two. Okay. Here is the reflip of your tailings. Oh, stop. Oh, stop, he says. Let's see. What's that? I don't know. I don't think so. It's not. No, no, no. It is. Maybe not. No. You did pretty good. One, two, three. Little guys. I like having four. Oh, there's not much there. Okay. Well, that makes me feel all right. You did well. All right. You did well. I did well because you showed me, man. Okay. Hayden, we had fun. You had almost no sapphires in that. What else can we do that's fun? I feel good. I would be very interested to see how your diamond sieve- Diamond sieve. Did on the- Because that'll catch all the stuff that falls through those bigger holes. Yep. So go into the bottom of the troughs. Take a- A pan, a sieve of that, and see if we get any? I'd be very interested to see what happened. Okay. I assume there's going to be a ton, a ton, a ton of very little ones. Let's go have a look. So the sieves that the gem mountain here provide have like an eighth-inch hole in it. Hayden wants to know what is falling through those holes that my sieve with one-sixteenth holes can catch. So I'm just going to scoop in the bottom and do one of the tailings, one of the garbage that went through the old sieves and see if we get a little ring. full. There we go. Well, I got a scoop off the bottom. It's all very uniform in size. If we get any, they're going to be small, small, small Hayden. I'm doing a ground sweep. You're doing a ground sweep too? Okay. I'm going to do this on a fresh flat table because my course pile over there with this fine, fine material, it would start to fall into there. Oh yeah, look at them all, everywhere through there, loaded in little guys. There are sapphires everywhere in here. Well that was awesome. Now we're going to take our finds, go inside and have them evaluate them. Tell us what we found for the day and see if there's any really good ones in there. And of course, once they're out of the vial, I can get some great shots. Well there we be, a couple of vials of sapphires. You're looking at the difference between a pro and an amateur. You did pretty darn good today. Oh thanks for showing me man. And once you've found your sapphires for the day, you come inside to the great shop where they have all sorts of neat rocks and crystals and everything going on in here. And this lovely lady here is going to evaluate my sapphires and tell me what I got for the day. I'm going to start by separating what is a sapphire from what isn't, bright light. I'm going to be pulling the sapphires just towards me and everything else will be pushed away from me. I always start doing this part first because that's our pre-sort, which is complimentary. You did a good job of getting only sapphires, but you do have a piece of garnet from our party bag it looks like. Something we also like to do is take a black light and shine it onto the sapphires. You see that bright glow? Yes. That is a sapphire with a lot of chromium inside of it. The more chromium you have, the brighter it lights up. So some of these other ones over here don't glow quite as well. But they do glow, yes. That just tells you the different levels of chromium that are in the sapphire. What about the big one over there? This one? Oh yeah, glows a little bit. Glows a little bit, but it's more purple than it is pink. The evaluation is $5 and we waive that fee if you place an order to get your sapphires heat treated and cut. Oh, we'll definitely take an evaluation. We'll pay for that. No problem. So I'm just picking these out based off of size and shape. This sapphire is big enough to cut technically. It's 0.64 of a carat. You want to start with a stone that's 0.50 or you're going to be getting back something a bit smaller than that. We've got a nice inclusion on the stone here and several fractures, so I wouldn't recommend this stone. This stone is on the thinner side, but it's still thick enough to cut just because I can see it through the tweezer still. And it has no flaws, so it's cuttable. More flawed than I would recommend. I was wondering what color this stone was going to look like once we got it under some proper lighting. You might be able to see how orange it is over here and how gray it is in other spots. That's a buildup of mineral inside of your gemstone and it would turn into color if you heat treated it. Heat treating is something we do to improve the color and clarity of your gemstone. It's a lot like taking a piece of shower glass and trying to turn it into a piece of nice stained glass. We break it down into two steps. We have the fancy burn and the blue burn. The fancy burn is going to bring out our fancy colors, the pinks, oranges, and purples. It's about 24 hours at about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. After the fancy burn, we'll pull your sapphires out to assess for color and clarity. If they're good, we'll pull them out. If they still need some more help, we'll put them in for a blue burn. The blue burn is about 36 hours at about 3,300 degrees Fahrenheit and it's going to turn your stone blue. So the rule of thumb is if you like the color of your stone, don't heat treat it because you can always get it heat treated after it's been cut. That does damage the polish of the stone, but it's not going to change the carat weight of your stone much to get it repolished. There we go. So you have several stones here. I wouldn't recommend four stones that have some flaws in them, but are still good for heat treating and faceting. Those flaws might be visible on the finished product, of course. And then a nice seven stones that are perfect for heat treating and faceting and shouldn't have any visible flaws. And then all of the stones on that chart have been heat treated and all of the cut ones were cut through a cutting house in Sri Lanka, the cutting house we lease out in Sri Lanka. So how much would it cost to get one or two of these heat treated and faceted? I've got a whole chart for you right here. If you were to stick to just one, that would be $60, two is $90, three is $120. If your stone came out that size right here, that smallest size is still worth roughly $100. That of course depends on what color it comes out and how clear it is and stuff like that. But right now it's a good rough estimate. And these are all stones from this site? They are. Excellent. I'm going to get a close up on some of them. Most of them have been heat treated. So like this one is 1.06 carats. It's loop clean, so it's got excellent clarity and it's $4,944. Okay, let's get the close up on some of these. That just tells you most of the colors on the outside of the stone. So I would recommend heat treating on it, but if you like that color, you don't have to. Okay, everyone wants to know, what's the most expensive stone on this tray right now? Well that one is $17,000. $17,000? $17,000, oh what was it, $757? Wow. And you can see that color change there, the orange to the green. $17,000? Mmhmm. Well there's the facetable stones. They're all facetable really, but these are the nice big ones. Good color, good clarity, few enough inclusions that they would make great, great gemstones. I think I'm going to send those all off to get faceted. I think that one there is my favorite. Great color, absolutely clear, perfect size and shape. But a lot of these are really nice. This camera is making them look a little bit greener than they are. They are a bit bluer than what is being shown here, probably that black background doing it to me. That is a great sapphire crystal. Far more yellow in this one, almost like two colors, but that could be a fracture in it. I think that's a fracture going through there. The cutters will definitely do what they need to to make these things perfect. Very green one, this one. These are going to be beautiful when they're done. I won't have these faceted for the video. I do have a couple I faceted from my trip 10 years ago. Let's see if I can find those and get some pictures to show you what they'll look like. This is one I had faceted years ago from my first trip to Gem Mountain. And same with that one. Not the little guy, little diamond, the pink, I'm not sure what that is. This is a green sapphire from Gem Mountain. This is a bluer sapphire from Gem Mountain. Not heat treated at all, this is just its natural color. And the smaller one. This one's more green than blue. Small flaw on the top, I think. I think that pink one might be one of the pink sapphires I got that first year. Let's have a look at it. Yes, this is a very pink sapphire, but it was really small and it had a layer of blue in with the pink, so it's a bi-color sapphire. Hard to focus on such a small thing. There we are, Gem Mountain sapphires, faceted. Don't worry about the little diamond in the background, that's something different. Now those were the sapphires that people at Gem Mountain suggested were facetable. Let's have a look at the smaller ones. I think I'll dump these out for a good picture of them as well. And there we be, Gem Mountain sapphires. Look at that pink one! Oh, I should get the black light out of that with the close-up camera. That'll be something else. Okay, I turned the bright light off. Let's see what it looks like with the black light. Wooo! Look at those things go! Anything that has even the slightest pink tinge on here glows like mad under the black light. But that one, wow! You see blue on this one, that's just some of the host rock. Not the sapphire itself. Alex, thank you so much. We had so much fun today. I'm glad you guys enjoyed yourselves. Thank you, thank you. You're very welcome. And if you find yourself at Gem Mountain, make sure you hunt out Alex here and get him to choose the bucket for you. His were the best! Well that was a hoot! We had so much fun here at Gem Mountain. If you find yourself in Montana, anywhere, you gotta make the trip to Gem Mountain. We're near Phillipsburg and the Gem Mountain people are awesome! Hayden, you have fun? I had a really good time, man. It's the first time I've ever done anything like this and it was a hoot, dude. It was a really good time. Awesome, awesome. Found some stones. Found some stones? Got two parrots, one in there? I think so, something like that. That's what they tell me, man. I don't know if they're just trying to make me feel good though. If you're around Gem Mountain, definitely take the opportunity. And of course, check out Hayden on his podcast. The Backcountry Manifesto. That can be streamed anywhere you find podcasts and you can also find video versions of the podcast on YouTube, Vimeo, all that stuff. So man, thank you so much for taking me out, dude. It was a great day. Hope y'all enjoyed the video. If you did, please leave me that thumbs up and I hope I earned your subscription today. Until the next one, bye!