Sapphires

 Last summer we took a long road trip back to the Midwest. On our travels through Montana, we stopped for a day at Gem Mountain outside of Philipsburg, a commercial sapphire mine. Well, not really a mine because the company scoops placer deposits from a quarry and bags the mud and brings it to the facility. Then you can buy 5-gallon pails of gravel and sift through them looking for sapphires.

Sam sifting through her bucket of gravel

We bought a bucket of gravel for each of us, and spent a nice morning looking through the gravel. In the end we found about 100 Carats of rough sapphires. Although the rough sapphires have some color to them, they did not have the vibrant blue color. 

 

Rough Sapphires

In order to bring out the color, the sapphires need to be heat treated by heating them to 500C for several hours. For a small fee, Gem Mountain will send your sapphires away for treatment. We did send some stones away for heat treatment and cutting, and we finally got them back today. Here are the two biggest stones, each ~2/3 carat.

Sapphires, treated and cut.

 

We only sent a couple of stones out for treatment  and cutting, so I still have ~100 smaller stones that I would like to see if I can treat myself. I tried to heat treat some of our sapphires at home, but I couldn't get them hot enough so next I am going to see if putting them in a kiln will work (as soon as I find someone who will let me use their kiln.)