Boys Diggin' in the Dirt

Hi. This is Jadan!

On the day of 9/1/2016, my awesome dad and I went to the Oceanview Mine in California. The Oceanview Mine is a mine (surprise!) where you set up a little five-hour dwelling place and sift for gemstones! And here's one of the best thing about it: You can keep all of the gems you find for FREE! You just have to pay $60 per person to get in...

So we went there with hopes of finding a few tourmalines, maybe a very small aquamarine, and probably a couple quartz crystals.

Boy were we wrong.

It works like this: The miners at Oceanview Mine go mining in the mine, using things like pickaxes for small areas, and sticks of dynamite for larger ones. They take the dirt, or "silt" that gets left behind from the explosions (from the dynamite, the pickaxes don't explode.), and put it all in a huge pile for the people (like my dad and me) to sift through. We went to the pile and filled up a bucket with the dirt, then lugged it back to our little station, where we poured it onto a sifting screen that was placed on top of a smaller-wired sifting screen. We shook the screen a few times, dunked it in some water, then found out that we were going to find MUCH more than we were hoping for (See the videos below).

There were 2-4 big rocks with green tourmaline in EVERY BUCKET. No kidding. And TONS of little green tourmaline (I'm getting kind of tired of typing "green tourmaline" over and over, so I'll just call it GT, OK?), I mean, GT, in every bucket too. There were always some smokey quartz in there as well. And, if you were lucky, (like me) you will find some PT (pink tourmaline) in every few buckets or so. My dad found about 100-thousand-billion-zillion (okay, more like, 6 or so) lepidolite stones. And quartz. TOO MUCH QUARTZ. Sometimes, there was so much quartz or GT, we had to throw every rock with quartz or GT into the junk pile! I had gone to the mine in hopes of finding some aquamarine, maybe even as big as my fingernail (as I mentioned before), and ended up leaving with 5 pieces! One was a column shape as big as my thumb! Or about 2-and-a-half inches tall, for those of you who don't know my thumb very well. There were lots of gems in our buckets that we either couldn't identify, I can't remember right now, or I feel are unnecessary to describe.

We also got a tour of some of the mineshafts: On a five-person four wheeler! Miss Janie (Okay wait. Quick intro to Miss Janie. She was the super nice lady who was managing the area while we were there. Super nice, and had super gem identifying skills. Moving on…) drove around a small mountain and showed us some of the mine entrances. They had to use air pumps to get air into the tunnels so the miners could breathe! We couldn't go into the mines, but we got to go into the first bit of rock blasted in the entire OV Mine! Well, only a little bit. We stepped in a few feet and saw some black crystals in the ceiling, but that was about it. We saw some historical places too, like the tunnel we went into where the workers at the OV Mine discovered two new minerals, Morganite and Kunzite! We also saw (across a couple mountains) the place where the Empress of China in 1900 sent workers to California to mine for pink stuff. No, seriously. She wanted pink, pink, and literally nothing but pink. If the miners found a blue, black, or any other colored gemstone, no matter how valuable it was, they would throw it off a cliff. No kidding. If there was a gem that was half-pink, half-black/blue/etc. they would break off the black/blue/etc. part and throw it off the cliff. The pile of thrown-away gemstones is still there, the property owned by someone who doesn't care about the gems at all, and now no one will ever get to see what's down that cliff. Who knows, there could be an undiscovered gem or mineral down there!

After a while, once we got back to siftin’ there was one gem in the small sifting screen that I didn't see. As Miss Janie was walking by once, and she peered into my sifter just before I was about to dump it. "oh, you don't want to miss this." She said, picking out a blue watermelon tourmaline (BWT) in my pile that I didn't even see! I gasped and thanked her and then she said again: "I hate to keep pointing everything out to you, but I see something pink." I looked where she was pointing, and there was a reddish-pink tourmaline! I thanked her again, and she smiled and moved on.

After a few more gems, rocks, and sifts, my dad and I decided that it was time to leave. So we packed our rocks into plastic bags and, after saying goodbye to some of the friendly people there, drove off. Orange trees on one side, cacti on the other, we drove down the road and talked about the experience we just had.  I wondered what color my shoes were (They were so white with dust I couldn't remember what my black shoes looked like). It's so amazing that God put little treasures into the dirt for us to find. The catch is, you have to work for it. Most people aren't willing to do the slamming of picks, or lighting of fuses, or even the sifting of small screens. It's kind of like following God. There will be hard work and sweat of digging deep into the life He wants us to live. There will be risks to take and things that might make us want to back down, but unfortunately no dynamite involved. Or maybe sometimes He wants us only to sit down and sift through His word, and pick out the valuable pieces He has us find. Hard work, risks, and just listening to what He has to say. Not everyone wants to do it. But at the end of all that, is the greatest treasure we could ever find. It's Him.

I had a fun time at the Oceanview Mine, and I found some stuff that I wasn't looking for. I met nice people, and had a good time with my dad. I hope you all have a good mining trip of life. Have a good day, and God bless.