We have this thing in the Northwest called rockhounding. I’m sure some of you have heard of it. It’s like mining, except instead of punching nature in the gut in order to take her goodies, she sprinkles some of her fairy dust in magical places before leaving you clues on where to find her treasures. Idaho is one of those magical places. Within three hours drive of our house we’ve discovered plume agate, jasper, opal, smokey quartz, thunder eggs, fluorite, zeolite, tourmaline, muscovite and garnets.
All I had to do to get the kids interested in such a whimsical outdoor activity was ween them on The Weather Channel show, “Prospectors.” Of course, I may have misrepresented how quickly they would become filthy rich from divining Mother Nature’s crystalline bounty, but…meh. It got them hiking around in the woods.
A little further afield from home, we’ve had fun discovering such gems as topaz and sapphires (corundum). This week, we made a whole family (on the wife’s side) excursion to the sapphire mine near Phillipsburg, Montana. Granted, we weren’t hiking around in the woods. This is one of those commercial operations where they charge you by the bucket to screen dirt and gravel in order to take away small gemstones. But there’s still much to enjoy.
You’ve got a long drive along a winding, washboarded mountain road featuring sheer cliffs and majestic waterfalls. As a direct result of said drive, you’ve got motion sickness. Don’t forget the hot-high-elevation sun combined with cool mountain air. Of course you’ve got mosquitoes and plenty of mud. Throw in a portable toilet (known colloquially as a “honey bucket”), and you can see the fun coming together!
Add a pinch of wildlife with a sprinkle of drama, and you’ve got a genuine reality TV show worthy of The Weather Channel. In this case, the drama included the wife dropping “the best and brightest pink sapphire to ever grace the mine” into the gravel beneath her screening table just as the whole VIP section was graced by a mother Moose and her two calves. Of course, being the courageous and dedicated husband and father that I am, I fought off the mother Moose with my bare hands while screening through all the gravel in a ten foot radius of the wife’s table with my feet. But…
when the sulphur-hail sharknado stormfront hit the area, there was only one thing I could possibly do to save the day—head for the ginormous candy shop in Phillipsburg where everyone in the extended family could buy a pound of candy in order to erase the rest of the experience from their memory. The beguiling Rocky Mountain Pink Panther had won again. Perhaps another husband and father, bolder than I, will succeed someday in wrenching it from the greedy teeth of the unforgiving bedrock…where nature has sprinkled her cursed fairy dust for the sole purpose of taunting me.
At least we all got some fresh air…and dark chocolate covered pecans.
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