This is what it's all about.
These stones came from right here, from this locality.
The largest cut stone here is a 4.26 cushion cut.
You see they're all a lovely blue color.
We've got a lovely, nice, big natural stone here, too,
that just came out of the jigs today.
This is where the bread and butter is right here,
and this is the sort of stuff that we're hauling over
to Eureka now and washing.
So that is between one inch and one eighth of an inch.
One of the things I want to point out-- we're
on top of the hill here.
We're not down in a drainage.
You do not need to have a drainage
to have sapphires here.
I think we could end up being certainly
the major colored stone producer in the Americas.
Our marketing plan for potentate is primarily
to be in the business of selling our rough production.
Potentate anticipates over the next few years
to be producing a substantial amount of rough sapphire
in all size ranges.
Between 13% to 15% of the production
comes with a nice, natural color-- pinks, yellows, blues,
blue greens.
And then the balance of the material
comes with slightly greenish, slightly brownish.
Those stones heat treat very well.
So how do we access the test site?
You'll see.
So we're right just about here.
And in this mining operation, all these gray areas
are areas that can contain sapphire alluvials.
Dick doesn't have anything on his geological map
to indicate a source rock.
But because of this airborne survey that we're just
done, here it is.
What I think we have here are two near horizontal sills--
one here and one here.
And you notice that there is virtually no sapphires north,
but there's a hell of a lot of them south down the slope.
You'll see our plant in a couple of minutes.
The plant can do about 50 or 60 cubic yards an hour.
That's running through a lot of material.
And the sapphires collect in the jigs,
and we periodically collect them and clean it out
and see what we get.
The stuff that we really want, which
is the gold and sapphire-bearing material,
is in the finer fraction.
It is traveling through a black pipe here.
That would be the fine gravel with sapphires and gold in it.
And then our primary recovery system is over here.
We have two sets of jigs and a sluice box.
And then the material passes over
what we call a tattle tale sluice that just indicates
to us if we're losing any gold.
That's on the back side of the big jig plant.
At this point, it's happy hunting.
This is what Gem Mountain is all about--
is when you can show up ad find something like this
in one of our gravel buckets.
I'm utilizing the methods and the equipment and technology
that Dr. John Emmett and his partner Troy Douthit
perfected with crystal chemistry.
The heat treating I do is considered natural
within the industry, that we do not
add any chemicals or flexes to influence the color,
and that the final color of the stone
will, from a scientific perspective,
be determined by the natural ratios of primarily iron
to titanium within the stone.
The vast majority of the rough sapphire here at Gem Mountain
is predominately a green color when it's found.
The heat treating process finishes the chemical reaction
within the stone to create the darker color
saturation that most people prefer within a finished
gemstone.
All of these orders are tracked via computer
with a written invoice and a detailed inventory
sheet of the number of pieces carat weight
and even individual stone weight.
Starting yesterday, we completed a high temperature [INAUDIBLE].
Many of the pale green sapphires will pick up
a distinct yellow hue.
At this point in time, one of the most tedious parts
of the heat treating process is the color sort.
We examine each stone that has an indication
of orange or yellow color, and then frequently
have to orient that stone so that we
can look into the center to determine whether or not
the color saturation penetrates deep enough
to create a beautiful finish gemstone of that color.
On Monday after the blue burn has completed,
a good 40% to 45% of these now-green sapphires
will be a very nice blue.
Here we go.
All right.
We're safe.
Perfect.
Well, we should see what we got, huh?
Oh, OK.
They're blue.
It's a fairly typical result. Around 45% of the stones
are going to come out a spectacular blue color.
I know there's always a lot of discussion to heat treat
or not to heat treat.
In the case of our material here at Gem Mountain,
there's just no question at all that the heat treating adds
a tremendous amount of value.
Any time you come up here with the rocks.
That's a good day, I guess.
That seems like a good trade to me.
These sapphires here are Missouri River sapphires.
They are found on the Missouri River
outside of Helena, Montana.
El Dorado bars, Spokane bars are both bars
that we actively mine.
These are the types of sapphires that come from here.
We'll start by heading upstream.
And it's going to about a two-mile run, two-mile jog
upstream to look at the first mines in the Missouri River
deposit, the French bar and Lovestone bar.
Now, this is French bar up here on the hillside.
And if you look real close at these hills,
you can see notches in them where the river was flowing
at that time.s And we're coming up
to the end of our trip upstream.
This was Canyon Ferry Dam, built in the mid '50s with help
from the dredge that mined sapphires
and gold at these deposits.
All right.
Everybody ready?
Ready.
Here we go.
Now, just to our left here in the very beginning
of Spokane Bar.
This is the front corner, and then the sapphires
go all the way down through the property we have here.
So sapphire bed layers sits atop of all this.
Yep, yep.
That's the bedrock.
So when we're mining in our pit and we go down to bedrock,
that's the material.
Now, real quick, you see this wooden ladder.
That ladder there was from the 1800s,
and they had a few guys working a tunnel
that they had built into there.
The next major deposits we're going to come across
are the El Dorado Bar and Dana's Bar.
El Dorado Bar, as we know, has been extensively mined,
both in the past and currently.
Dana's Bar, however, is much harder to mine
and is seldomly mined because of the deep overburden.
As we progress down, this whole right-hand side
of the water in all El Dorado Bar.
It's a very large deposit that has
yielded some of the best sapphires on the river system
here.
And if you look straight on the right at 3 o'clock--
you see all of the machinery up there?
So you can see our mining operation up there
on the hillside.
The family first started mining here roughly 65 years ago.
And what happened was the land where our office currently
is at the Spokane Bar Sapphire Mine was up for sale.
And my grandparents loved the idea
of buying it for a place to go camping on the weekends.
They purchased the land, owned it
for a few years at that point.
And one day, my mother, who at the time
was six or seven years old, dove down into the lake,
picked up a handful of pea gravel,
and there was this little blue rock
sitting in the handful of gravel that she found
at the bottom of the lake.
Found some more sapphires, and we've been mining ever since.
The pay layer is the layer of material
that is just above bedrock.
It's alluvial materials.
That material is the layer that has
carried the sapphires downstream and deposited it.
The grizzly is a simple mechanism
for classifying material.
It's a big screen with two-inch holes in it.
Once we have the raw material there ready to run,
we feed it into basically a feeder.
It gives it a constant flow rate and feeds the material
into the trommel.
From the trommel, it washes and classifies it,
gets rid of all the sand, and it gets
rid of all the rest of the big rocks.
And all we're really after is the gravel,
the 5/8 inch gravel to 1/8 inch gravel.
That's our sapphire-bearing material.
The gravel then-- sapphire is included,
hopefully-- go into our jig, where they're
separated by specific gravity.
Sapphire, being a denser mineral,
will get trapped in there along with gold,
garnet, hematite, and so forth.
And all the light material gets kicked out
with no sapphires or gem-bearing material left in it.
We'll then go down there and suck it out with vacuums
and reveal the sapphires at that point.
As we're mining these sapphires, we don't use any chemicals.
We don't use any environmentally damaging methods.
We reclaim and plant new trees and grasses
that are natural and native behind us as we're mining.
And we love the idea of keeping this state just as
beautiful as the sapphires we're pulling out.