2007/06 BC trip - Okanagan Opals |
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We had a pleasant but wet drive across the rest of the Monashees towards Vernon on Okanagan Lake. In the last few miles the trees thinned out as we got to the Okanagan’s almost desert climate. The rain had stopped by the time we’d made our way to the Okanagon Opals store. They’d moved but, luckily, only to next door. They’d sublet their big showroom and were in smaller premises. Not enough crazy rockhound customers in the area, I guess.
If we’d been contactable, they would have called us later on Thursday to say “Friday’s back on”, as they had a family come in that wanted to go out on the Friday, but then the family cancelled when they woke up to Friday’s rain. So we were going to be mining with them on the Saturday morning.
We asked about camping and they said they had hoped to put in a campground at the mine but then found out that they had to have all sorts of facilities in order to have a commercial campground. We didn’t need any facilities, so they gave us directions on how to get up to the mining area and then we could find our own site nearby. Their route took us along the west shore of Okanagan Lake through the Okanagan Indian Reservation and then across ranches until we reached an unmaintained logging road and took off up the mountain. The road wasn’t too bad except for a lot of trees down and half down. A winch would have been useful, but instead we drove over some, around others, and through a few. We found a flat spot for lunch and stayed there for a few hours as thunderstorms rolled through and filled up the holes in the road.
Vernon had been busy and bustling as this was the long Canada Day weekend, but no one else came up this road! However, if they did, then we would have been in their way, so we went further up the road and found the mine site, a sea of mud after all that rain. We saw no one at the mine, just a herd of cows that seemed to think they were in charge. The upper section of the road looked to be maintained and active so we found a flat spot further off the road so that we wouldn’t be wiped out by a late evening logging truck. Luckily the flat spots created by the loggers for loading their trucks are well built, so there’s little danger of sinking in even if they are waterlogged.
Saturday June 30th
We had a quiet wet night and a cool sunny morning. We explored a little and found big 
displays of flowers, met a few inquisitive deer, and disturbed a hoary marmot, living in a wood pile. Mines and clear cuts are ugly scars on the mountains but they do provide light for the flowers and shrubs and food for many animals.
We saw no traffic at all until this couple came up the road on their Bombardier ATVs. He used to be a logger operating in that area, and they still come up there to explore. Bob (the Opal man) arrived an hour or so later, leading a line of sport utility vehicles holding a dozen or so eager miners. One of the vehicles, a van, had 
suffered a transmission failure and had been abandoned on the road for the day. Consensus was that it had snagged and ripped a hose on one of the downed trees.
Bob had found the opal seams years earlier when he was prospecting for gold. We weren’t going to be hacking out the virgin rock, but rather working through a large pile of rock extracted from the mine’s pits. Opal usually forms in the cracks between rocks. There was plenty of basic opal or potch, which, being white, was easy to find, but also worthless. Precious opal is much rarer, 
usually just tiny patches on the side of a large mud-covered rock, so most of the searching involved picking up rocks and cleaning them off. Sandie is a natural at this so she found a few pieces: one cutable opal and a few thin pieces of boulder opal. Most of the miners came away with nothing but potch.
Luckily, it was cool to cold and we were bundled up, which protected us from the swarms of bugs. We worked until mid-afternoon. On the way down the mountain we met and squeezed past the wrecker that was coming up for the dead van. 
We went back to the shop, where Bob showed us some of the beautiful specimens they’ve found at the mine. He also showed us some clear opals he’d had faceted in China. The problem he’d had was that some of them would suddenly go cloudy weeks afterwards, rendering them near worthless. He thought that they may have got too hot during the cutting, so he warned Sandie to keep hers cool.