Day 5 - Garnet Hunt

Thankfully we awoke to bright blue skies and a light breeze. After the storm of yesterday, this was a
great way to start the day! It's interesting how a scary experience makes you appreciate when things go smoothly.

Our purpose for coming to Ruby Reservoir was the lure of finding garnets that might be large enough to have faceted. This was our chance to give it a try. A leisurely breakfast of cinnamon bread French Toast followed by a coffee on the "veranda" aka the bluff was a gradual lead in to today's activity.

After our morning coffee was gone, we gathered our gold pans, shovel, and a tube for collecting all of our garnets :-) To get to the beach we could go down a hazardous looking steep trail or walk a bit further to a more gradual trail. We opted for the latter and safely got down to the rocky shore. A couple of other people were already down there picking through the gravel on the beach and then washing it with a gold pan.

They welcomed us and asked if we'd done "this" before, to which of course we said, "No". So they gave us a quick description of how they worked the gravel and showed us some of their finds, including some garnets that hadn't been rounded off by the wave action yet. Those really didn't look much like a garnet, but more of a dark lumpy stone.

In this age of Covid craziness, it has been so refreshing to meet people who are welcoming and happy to visit or share information. Travelers for the most part seem to be happy folk. Ahh, I digress... back to garnets.

Pat and I scooped up some beach gravel in our gold pans, carefully picked our way down to the water's edge, and stepped into the warm water.  If you haven't panned for gold, or in this case garnets, before there is a basic technique. Your goal is to wash off the mud, shake off the lighter material, and end up with the heavier black sand which is where you find your prize.

Some people use more of an up and down, bouncing, method. I tend to use more of a wrist action shaking the pan side to side which sends the gravel in a circular motion. The idea is that the heavier material will sink to the bottom and then you can dip your pan in the water and let some of the lighter material float off. Larger rocks and gravel can be picked out and thrown in the water. For gold you have to repeat the process quite a while to get down to just black sand and then swirl the sand which leaves the gold flecks behind.

In a matter of minutes we were finding little garnets! I didn't even have to finish washing off all of the lighter material and some bright red stones appeared. Pat's pan had a lot of garnets too. We started picking our finds up with tweasers and putting them into a plastic tube that has a small hold in its rubber cap. Each pan had so many teeny tiny garnets the black sand looked more maroon with all the garnet bits.


At first we were picking out all of the garnet pieces we could pick up with the tweasers, but after a few pans we became more selective about the ones we kept. We found a few of the pieces that don't really look like garnets, but mostly we found the bright red ones. Some of the garnets are maroon or a darker purple color. It will be interesting to see if we can get any of these cut. One rock I found appears to have larger garnet crystals embedded in it. When I get home, I'll clean it up and see if the stone shows how the gem forms a crystal shape before breaking off into smaller pieces.

Within a couple of hours we had filled half our tube and decided to go back to camp for a lunch break. Of course I had to unload my pockets which had gotten filled with other rocks that were cool. There were many with fools gold in large clumps, along with a lot of quartz.

We spent a couple more hours after lunch filling the rest of our tube. I had a hard time stopping the hunt. It is so intriguing to see what you will find in the next pan. However, I was stumbling over the rocks in the lake more often and a few times ended up slipping into waist deep water. Actually, the water was quite warm so it felt good to get wet, but eventually I finished my last pan and tottered back up the beach to camp.

A successful venture had to be rewarded with a cold brew from the Phillipsburg Brewery which we enjoyed on our veranda! This time we opted for the coffee porter, a very smooth dark beer, not quite a meal in itself, but close. A nice breeze kept us cool in the late afternoon sun. What a difference a day makes!

Tomorrow's plan is to tour some of the ghost towns located in this part of the state.