Enjoy Every Sandwich

One of the tourist attractions near the Pintler Scenic Loop (MT Hwy 1) is called Gem Mountain. You take Skalkaho Road about 16 miles or so away from Highway 1 through some beautiful country to dirt road off of which you will find this place.

I did this with E. last summer. Each of us had a bucket of dirt to sort through ourselves. In the last couple of weeks, I had the pleasure of a return trip with D. and Mr. D during which we shared one bucket of dirt. Both trips yielded several gems for everyone. As of yet, I have ended up with nothing worth cutting for jewelry, but I will definitely be going back again. It’s great fun, and it is especially enjoyable when the weather is cloudy but not too rainy.

When you arrive at Gem Mountain, you park in the parking lot, go into the building and pay for however many buckets of dirt you want, and then return to the entrance near the parking lot to get your dirt. There is an option to buy higher priced buckets pre-seeded with gems. I recommend just going with the basic bucket because I have never gotten, nor ever heard of anyone else ever getting, a bucket with no gems.

Back at the entrance, teenagers will fill up buckets with dirt for you, and issue you some tools including a film cannister with an X cut in the lid, a pair of tweezers, gloves if you want them and a scrub brush. If you are new they will also provide you with a short tutorial on how to get gems out of your bucket of dirt.

The process basically involves using gravity to wash and sort the crap in your bucket. You dump some of your dirt into a square frame with a screen on the bottom and then take it over to a very large shared trough of filthy water.

You first gently bounce the screen up and down in the water to wash the contents inside and to spread them out to the edges and corners. Then you rock it like a seesaw back and forth around the central axis of the screen to pile the contents up like a mountain along that axis in the middle. Turn the screen 90 degrees and then repeat this process several times to get as much dirt, grass, etc. as you can out of the pile. End the wash and sort process by bouncing the contents back out evenly across the screen.

Next you take the screen to one of the wooden tables and invert it onto the table.

If you have done a very good job at the wash trough, most of your gems will wind up on top of the inverted pile near the center. I don’t know how the seasoned folks do it, but as a newbie I sorted through the whole pile of crap anyway. It was definitely worth it.

As you pick sapphires out of your pile of gravel using a set of tweezers, you press them into the top of a film cannister through an X cut in the lid for safe keeping. This has led to an occasional tragic tiddlywinking incident. When you are through sorting what is on your table, you simply brush it onto the ground and begin again until your bucket is empty.

Once you are through looking for sapphires, you can take your cannister inside the building to have your gems appraised for free. The appraisers will sort and weigh them, and they will tell you which ones are too small or too flawed to cut. Any that are worth cutting they will identify for you, show you roughly how large the final product will be once each is cut, and bag separately from the others. They will also give you information on how to get them heat-treated and cut if you so choose. You get to take home all of your gems regardless of their value.

I highly recommend doing a half-day trip there in the morning to be followed up by a picnic lunch a little way up the dirt road near Skalkaho Falls. A whole day at Gem Mountain could be a pain in the neck- literally. For some of us taller folks, the tables aren’t exactly an ideal height either sitting or standing. I’ll have some comments and pictures of the falls up here later.