Emerald Creek Garnet Area
The sun came out!
So from Moscow, ID we headed Northeast to the St. Joe Ranger District turning left just past Clarkia. Steve and his wife, the camp hosts at Emerald Creek Campground, stopped to see if we needed any help while we were looking at the informational kiosk. They assured us we were headed in the right direction.
Emerald Creek Campground
We drove through the campground but decided to drive further down the road towards the Garnet area and see if we could find something with less people. We found a great spot to camp, next to the creek. Even though it was right off the road, the only traffic was in the mornings and late afternoon, just the people going to the Garnet area.
Emerald Creek Garnet Area
Sluicing for garnet was a blast. Randy surprised me with this fun side trip. We got there at 9:00 AM, only 2 cars and then another arrived as we were gathering our stuff. The parking area is on Forest Service Road 447, and the sluice area is a 1/2 mile hike up 281 Gulch. The ranger that sold us the permits got all excited when she saw that we were the first visitors from South Carolina this year, so we got to flip the license plate over on her neat map.
How to Find the Garnet
Ranger Gideon told us the steps to getting some garnet. He showed us some garnet that he had found, and what to look for, saying he looks for brownish veins in the cracks of rocks. But the big goal is to find the 12-sided dodecahedron crystals, that is where you’ll find four or six ray stars inside. We heard India has only four ray stars and Idaho is the only place for six ray stars. India and Idaho are the only places in the world where star garnets are found.
To get started you go to a heaping muddy hillside where they have stockpiled the garnet-bearing material. It’s brought in from some place up the road, they are very cagey about where the garnet-bearing gravel comes from. Grabbing two buckets and a shovel, provided for you, you fill one of the buckets with as much dirt as you can carry, then you hump it over to the sifting area, they have the large screened trays for you to sift your dirt, leaving just the gravel, dumping it into your other empty bucket, then you hump your gravel to the sluicing area, where there are two long sluicing troughs with a constant stream of running water, so you can wash and screen the gravel for garnets, they provide the screen trays in this area too.
For this process you pour your gravel into the tray and begin swishing the tray back and forth, using your hands to rub the gravel against the screen and each other, washing the dirt off the rocks and gems. You need to do this 6-10 times to find all that is in the tray. There is not just garnet to find, but other gem faceting material also. It’s $10 for a daily permit, you can take up to five pounds of garnet and as many pounds of other gem stones as you can carry out.
Star Garnet Day
We spent the whole day, 9:00-4:00. Randy did all of the digging, carrying buckets, sifting, and humping. I sifted once, when we first got there, and then did the washing and screening in the sluicing area, Rans did some sluicing too. Before going we thought I would be doing the sifting and sluicing and Randy would just do the digging, however the sifting turned out to be a lot of heavy lifting, so Randy had to get a permit too.
It was a fun day listening to folks talk as they labored and told stories. Lots of characters, a 2 year old had a blast playing in the dirt and mud, along side his mom and grandmother, playing with their own dirt and mud. There was a father with his son and daughter, about 10-13 years old, they were a joy to listen to, they seem to do this a lot, not just garnet but other gems as well. They were the big winners of the day, finding not just one golf ball sized garnet but two of them, one maybe even a dodecahedron!
Steve the camp host
Steve, the camp host came up early in the morning and was a fount of information on how to spot the garnet. He also was pointing out the other gems as well as telling about the ocher—red, yellow, black & white, there was tons of it. It is very soft and muddy and when you squish it you can see the colors. He said the Indians would mix it with grease to make their paint. He and his wife spend winters in Quartzsite, AZ, what a small world! The place filled up by noon but was not so crowded that we didn’t have room. We were happily surprised that we actually found garnet, we left with a quarter pound. I also got a small container full of garnet sand from Emerald Creek at our campsite.
The Weekend
We got there Thursday so we could get an early start on Friday at the Garnet area, and spent the rest of the weekend at our Emerald Creek dispersed camp spot, leaving on Sunday morning. It was a quite, peaceful and beautiful time.
http://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/ipnf/recarea/?recid=6927
Garnet Area Gallery
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as to my last comment of parking next to the road and the noise factor, you answered my question in this post. thank you .
i like the Garnet sluicing adventure. you spent all day doing it? sounds like fun. are the garnets those little black-looking stones? i ask this cause we have a creek here in my valley here that i sluiced little bright red stones/gems out of the mud with my bare hands. they were tiny little chips ruby-red that i called garnets. i guess i noticed the red shining in the water and picked it up and saw others. yer’s are almost black but mine were ruby-red.
sounds like you had lots of fun, and the photos were nice and i like the camp song. i see ya still have another post for me to read and enjoy. so far this afternoon i have been here nearly three hours reading and commenting. im off to Coeur D’Alene next.