Pictures! I’m rich, bitch!
For those of you out there lurking and waiting to kill me and take my booty I finally have some booty for the taking!
Dig day #1 took me to the Virgin Valley in Northwetsern Nevada to look for black opal. I was optimistic (as always) going in, but more realistic as to what to expect. I didn’t hink I was going to find much if only a few specs of highly precious black opal, only lucky S.O.B.s who aren’t me find the logs worth tens of thousands of dollars. Well, It turns out I really am a lucky S.O.B!
What you are looking at, friends and family, is about 10 pounds of the most valuable gemstone the lower 48 states has to provide. There is “fire” (a type of iridescence that flash through all the colors of the rainbow) contained in several of these big ass logs. Fire black opals sell for about $1000+ per carat, I now have almost 10,000 carats of black opal (not all of it fire opal–OK, only a little bit of it is actually fire opal, but it’s more than enough to make a big dent in my student loans; for once). The stuff without fire is still a good value (if you don’t believe me, just look it up on Ebay). And just so you know, ladies, I am still single.
Above is about a 10-20 carat piece of precious opal with some fire. I am sorry that the image is so blurry but my camera’s “macro” setting is apparantly a lie to convince me to take blurry pictures of things up close. That is a really good find right there.
Dig Day #2 took me to Topaz Mountain in Western Utah where I went to look for, well, topaz. Duh. I got dozens of the buggers while having a great time smashing rocks with my hammer and talking with a lovely couple, Karen and Pat, from Montana. They own a sapphire mine back home. Can you guess where I am going this summer?
Later in the day I climbed a big cliff, and didn’t fall off of it (this year), to look for the rarest gemstone in the world, bixbite, aka red beryl, aka red emerald. Behold!
Yes, that incredibly tiny thing took 4 hours to find. Four hours! But I got it. It was still in its matrix (the rock it was found in) but I showed it to a little cub scout and he plucked it right out, the little shit. So now I have a free-floating, extremly rare gemstone in a plastic bag that took me a lot of pain and misery clinging for dear life to the edge of a 200 foot face while wielding two, that’s right two, rock hammers. Do you want to know how rare a teeny little stone that thing is? Only one in 2 million will ever have the opportunity to own one. for every 150,000 diamonds found only one bixbite is found. It is that rare… and mine might be the smallest ever–but at least if someone ever says to me, “hey houston, you’re one in a million.” I can reply, “you bastard! You scoundrel! I measure no greater than one in TWO million!”
Dig day #3 I found myself at Sunstone Knoll in the middle of some godforasken salt flats in a tiny burg called The Middle of Nowhere, Utah (population 11,000,000 scorpions and one very terrified kangaroo mouse) where I collected of all things sunstones. I got hundreds of them. There were literally lying about the place. I basically picked them up off the ground until my thighs burned so much that I could no longer do any more squats. How many squats can Houston do, you ask? One ziplock bag’s worth, that’s how many.
I am glad I was smart enough to bring a bottle of Alieve with me. My dogs are barking.
Right now I am resting at my brother’s home in extremely beautiful Boulder, Utah for the next day or so and then the adventure continues.
Next up is some pink sunstones from New Mexico, maybe some auriferous pyrite (gold barring shiny, squishy rock), and some gold nuggets from AZ. If there is time, and my arms aren’t too sore from wielding tools all day I may try my hand at some tourmaline in San Diego.
Until the next internet connection, ta ta!
