2005/04 Deep South trip - Mason Mine |
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We made our way to the Mason Mine, which was open this time. This is a sapphire mine, with a simple agenda. You dig
dirt from the hillside and carry it back to the flume in buckets. The flume is a long channel with water flowing. The miners dump the dirt into screen boxes and use these to wash the dirt, mainly red clay, leaving the rocks for examination by the happy miner. The examination is difficult though, as the sapphires are covered in kaolin. This makes them hard to spot, but the bigger ones, called stems, are more recognizable, as they are cylindrical with six sides. We did quite well, finding a few large stones, the best being a six-carat stem about ¾ inch long. We can’t tell how good the stones are until we get them home and can clean them up with muriatic acid.
It was here that I realized why the locals thought our screen boxes were so weird. The screens here are rectangular, made to fit into the bed of a flume. Nearly all these mines are partway up a mountain, with access to plenty of flowing water, so flumes are easy to use. Our screens come from the Australian desert, where flowing water is a rarity. If you want water at an Australian mine site, you carry it out with you in a 55 gallon oil drum. So the Australian screens are round, made to fit an oil drum. I explained this to one of the locals but I don’t think he believed me.
For our last hour we went creekin’ again, digging around behind boulders in the stream’s cascades. We found a few more gems, but were pretty numb and battered by the water at the end. The mine closed at 5 pm so we blasted north looking for another campsite.
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