(uplifting music) - Grab your pickax, your hiking boots, and your car keys, 'cause this time on "Wild Nevada," I'm exploring across the state in search of the precious and semi-precious gemstones and rocks that the state has to offer.

All that's coming up right now on "Wild Nevada."

- [Narrator] Support for PBS Reno and "Wild Nevada" comes in part from the William N. Pennington Foundation.

Bill Pennington was an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and gaming pioneer who built a legacy of community service in Nevada.

This program is brought to you in part by the Connor Kent Robinson Giving Fund.

100 years of living in 28 years of life.

To give is life's real gift.

- [Narrator] And by Millie Hopper and Millard Reed, Kristine Perry, Thelma B. and Thomas P. Hart Foundation, Margaret Burback.

In memory of Sue McDowell, Mark and Susan Herron, and by individual members.

(uplifting music) - Hi, I'm Chris Orr, and this time I'm exploring some of the rock hound adventures that Nevada has to offer.

Now, Nevada's called the Silver State because of our abundance in that precious metal.

But, the unique landscape and geology of Nevada lends itself to treasure troves of other minerals and gemstones.

For this adventure, there's not a better place to start than just outside of Denio, and with the precious gemstone of the black fire opal.

(uplifting music) From Denio, we head west on Highway 140 toward Virgin Valley.

It's a very scenic and remote 27 miles until we turned south onto Sage Brush Road.

After another seven miles, we reached the Rainbow Ridge Opal Mine.

There were discoveries of Opal in the Virgin Valley around 1905 that led to a boom of opal prospecting and mining around 1907.

Rainbow Ridge Opal Mine has been in production for over 100 years and has been owned and operated by the Hudson family since 1949.

As I get ready to start my day's prospecting, I meet mine owner Glen Hudson.

- Welcome to Rainbow Ridge.

(uplifting music) - So what am I looking for today?

- Well, looking for opal today.

- What is an opal?

- Opal is a hydrated silica.

And so silica is basically around us all the time.

But in the case of an opal, it's silica that was dissolved by water and carried into a void.

Here it's where wood had rotted away.

So it kinda lends that wood aspect to it, which can make it even more interesting, some of the forms.

- So I know Nevada's precious gemstone is the black fire opal.

- Yes.

- Is that the type of opal that you guys have here?

- The black opal is the most sought after.

It's the most beautiful.

All things being equal, a black opal will show play of color better than any other base color of opal.

It's also the rarest.

- So there's multiple types of opal out here to find?

- Yeah, opal can be anywhere from water clear through whites, virtually any type of body color, ambers, greens, on into the black.

- Have you ever had anyone find an opal that you were jealous of?

- Oh yeah.

Yeah.

I see it almost daily.

I've seen what I consider to be the best black opal I've ever seen.

- Oh, wow.

- By a guy from Fernley.

He's been digging with me for a lot of years and he knew it as soon as he saw it, that it was one of those special opals.

- When a person comes out, what should they expect here at the mine?

What's the course of the day look like?

- We start at 8:00 in the morning.

If people are working on a virgin ground load, they're probably gonna be busy until four o'clock.

(uplifting music) - So when we find opal today, I'm saying when we find opal, 'cause I know I'm gonna find opal today, I feel lucky.

I know I'm gonna find opal.

What do I do with it once I find it?

- So opal that's coming out of the virgin ground, in other words, freshly mined clay is completely hydrated.

The ground temperature is around 48 degrees.

So it's cool and it's moist, it's happy.

Opal that dries out has a tendency, especially the opal from Virgin Valley, has a tendency to crack and craze as it dries out.

So when you're mining opal out of virgin ground, it should be kept in water.

And so we cleaned the specimens up, get the clay and the mud off of it, and then put 'em in a display tube, we call them domes, with water, and a rubber stopper so they don't leak out.

And the water kind of helps show the color.

- How long does it take for an opal to dry out?

- Well, I've seen people that weren't very careful with their opal.

You know, take an opal out of the quad, set it on their tailgate, and in 15 minutes see cracks forming.

It's that quick.

As they lose their moisture, it sets up an irresistible strain within the stone, it wants to break.

Kinda like pouring concrete on a hot, sunny day and just walking away from it, it's gonna crack.

- When people find things, do you see them get hooked on this?

- Yeah, I've seen people just go crazy with seeing what mother nature can provide.

I've watched it, you know, change people's lives, that all of a sudden they're now addicted to searching for opal.

When you see that first amazing piece in the colors, it's almost hard to believe that it came from the ground.

- What do I need to be ready to go?

- Well, some special tools that we make for processing clay.

You want to have your hat and your sunscreen and some gloves and a big old bucket of water, and lots of drinking water.

You wanna stay hydrated on a day like today.

(uplifting music) This is a virgin ground load on a table.

We start by cherry picking.

The opal can camouflage pretty well.

In other words, you, you have a wood shape that's covered in clay, and so it's the same color as the clay that it's in.

And until you remove that clay, oftentimes, you're going just by shape alone.

You take a look at everything that you've got here, and if you've got a wood shape, limbs, twigs, pine cones, anything that's glassy, reflective.

- So I am immediately seeing some things flash.

I'm like ready to grab, - Do it.

When you're looking at an opal, you want to use the sunlight in a couple different angles.

- Oh wow.

Look at that.

- So get it, get it right into the sun.

This one's got fire.

And so with reflected light, you can see that it's got, you know, reds and greens in there.

- [Chris] Oh yeah.

- It's also fairly transparent opal.

So turn and, and hold it between you and the sun.

- Oh my gosh, look.

- [Guide] Put light through it that way.

- Is that a pretty good one?

- Yes.

There's an opal here.

- Oh wow.

Look at this guy.

You can actually like see wood grain on this.

- Yeah.

You can see the profile of it, that it was a limb.

You can tell that the origin of it was from a tree.

And so when they're in the round, if you will, it's gonna show more of the wood character than if it's a broken fragment.

- Wow.

- All right, so there's a lot of dirt here for me to get through.

- Yes.

- All right.

That means you guys are doing this with me.

You guys ready?

Okay.

- Alright.

Have fun today, guys.

- Oh my gosh.

This is gonna be so much fun.

With so much Virgin Valley dirt to carefully sort through, it's all hands on deck, while Nevada videographers Alex Munich and Joey Lovato jump from behind the cameras and eagerly join me in getting a little dirty.

I think this is pretty cool.

- Oftentimes we're working on days that are overcast, and so you never wanna make a decision out in the field.

You want to throw it in the bucket, let it get cleaned up, look at it with some good light, and just keep on moving.

(uplifting music) - Let's see what we got.

So I didn't wanna get rid of anything.

So I probably overs saved.

- Give us a little shot in there.

There we go.

All good stuff up.

Okay, now.

- Oh wow.

Look at now that.

- It's got color here, and it's got color all under the skin here.

- That's beautiful.

- This is huge.

- Have guys been mining opal for a long time?

- Yeah, this year is 75 years for my family out here.

- So have you ever thought about doing anything different than running this mine?

- No, I love it here.

I love the material.

Get to meet some really neat people.

Couldn't ask for anything better, anything else I'd rather do.

- With such great luck at Rainbow Ridge Opal Mine, we're inspired to make the drive to our next gym hunting destination, Garnet Hill.

We leave Denio and return to Highway 140 and Route 95 heading south to Interstate-80, and then take Highway 278 and ultimately Highway 50 toward Ruth, Nevada, which is not far from the town of Ely.

A little warning for you, if you're using your phone for directions, Google Maps shows two Garnet Hills, so be careful, or else this could happen.

Don't always trust your phone apps because Garnet Hill outside of Ely, it's actually pretty easy to get to.

But our phones decided to send us to a multitude of other off-road destinations in the Garden Hill area.

I'm thinking maybe it was a different route or that they had washouts.

We ended up in a very sketchy four-wheel-drive situation.

So lesson learned, double check your map and not your phone app.

All you have to do is look for this sign that reads Garnet Hill Recreation Area at the Pole Line Road and you're golden.

Garnet Hill's the only designated Rock County area in the Ely District, and it's an internationally known site for gym collectors looking for garnets.

At the rock hounding area, we meet Brett Wagers with the Ely Bureau of Land Management Office.

- Brett, thanks for meeting me out here.

- Yeah, absolutely.

I love Garnet Hill.

It's a place where, you know, families and everyone from the community can come out and rock hound.

- So it is okay for me just to come out and pick up rocks and find gemstones.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And people sometimes are a little nervous on whether they can bring shovels or chisels and all of that's allowed.

You can go to town essentially on Garnet Hill.

- How do I find them?

- The garnets are in little vesicles inside the rite, and the best way to get 'em is to take a hammer and and chip one open.

- Well, I've got my tools.

Should we get going?

Should we start?

- Let's go.

- I'll let you guide.

- Alright.

You can point me to the good stuff.

There's certain structures in the rocks we should look for more than others to indicate that they have garnets possibly.

- So yeah, you should pick up a piece of rhodolite, and if you can actually find a bug inside, sometimes there's some garnets that for 'em.

- [Chris] Oh, okay.

- There's an actual little bit of garnet there.

It's doesn't have any faceted faces on it, but you can just keep looking.

- And it's just that easy.

- Just that easy.

So garnets can range quite a bit here.

The thing that makes Garnet Hills so attractive for rock counters is the fact that, you know, some sites will have an abundance of garnets, but they're very small.

Some sites will have very large garnets, but they're very hard to find.

The best thing about Garnet Hills, we have a lot of garnets and they're very decent size.

- So now that we have a couple that we think have garnets in it, do we just smack 'em open and take a look at it?

- Yeah.

And here's one that we actually fractured ourselves, and what we're looking for is these little bugs, these where the garnets would form.

Unfortunately we didn't get lucky with this one, but just try and try again.

(hammer smashing) - That is loud.

This one we kind of have a little edge of one showing, right?

- Right.

- So do we smack that one?

- Unfortunately, the garnets are a little bit fragile, so we probably wouldn't smack this one, if we wanted this garnet.

We would probably take out a small chisel and we would just work around the un-faceted side of the garnet until it came out.

(uplifting music) - So Brett, this is what we're looking for, right?

- That's exactly what we're looking for.

The garnets here are called almandine spessartine garnets.

And that has to do with the other elements, the other cations found.

- I found another one.

It's a little buried in there.

- There you go.

- Is that it?

- That's a garnet.

- That's a garnet.

And that's kind of what you're looking for in these washes here.

- It's funny, I thought at first it was a dried berry, but this is actually the garnet.

- Yeah, it does look like a juniper berry.

But yeah, that is a garnet and that that's what you'll find typically when you walk these washes.

That one's actually got some really good facets on it.

- Well I've got a little handful of treasures now.

- Yeah, you certainly do.

- Thank you so much for meeting me out here and getting me started at this.

- Absolutely.

I really love this experience of you guys coming out and I hope this brings more people out to Garnet Hill.

- Well it's got me Garnet Fever, so I think I'm addicted, so I'm gonna keep looking.

But thank you so much for your time today.

- You're welcome, Chris.

(uplifting music) - It's so much fun finding gemstones at Garnet Hill.

Whether you wanna take the tactic of working them out of rocks or try your luck searching for them in the wash and rockfall areas, you're sure to have a pocket full in no time.

With my treasures found, it's time to get some rest and be ready for more rocks and gems tomorrow.

We're up early and headed west on Highway 50 from Ely to Austin on our next rock hounding adventure.

This time we've made arrangements visit a privately owned fluorite mine in the area that's putting out some beautiful rocks.

Up in the mountains outside of Austin, we find the mine site and several rock hounds.

We are joined by the claim holders, Vince and Michelle Dyer.

Thank you for letting me come out and visit you guys.

- Yeah, we're excited to have you.

- Welcome.

- What is the name of the mine?

- The Pleiades Mine.

And what are you guys finding here?

- Opalized fluorite and a stone that we have trademarked Palladian Stone, - Which is the opalized fluorite, and we also find rainbow fluorite.

- Every piece that we pick up outta here, it gets made into something.

A lot of people like to just collect it, but every piece is capable of being made into a piece of jewelry.

- We have let people come out and they get to come out and dig, and that's been a lot of fun, because the people that we've gotten to meet have just been awesome.

There's a rock world out there, and there's rock hounds as we call the kids, pebble puppies, and they graduate into rock hounds.

Pebble puppies.

I love that.

I had, that's it.

You need to trademark that too.

Along with the stone.

- When I was a kid we used to mine turquoise in this valley, and so we used to do a lot of little rock hounding and we found some purple stones in the valley floor, and about 25 years later I decided to come back and find out where those stones came.

And so we spent a year and we found them up here on this mountain and then we got ahold of some people and found out that this was a claimed piece of property and spent a couple years trying to negotiate.

- So growing up, working in the turquoise mine, did you ever think you were gonna own a mine yourself?

- Yeah, actually I, that was one of my dreams when I was a little kid.

I always thought it'd be turquoise though.

- I've got a couple tools with me, so do you guys wanna show me what we're looking for?

- You bet.

- Okay.

(uplifting music) This is all from this mine?

- Yes, this is all from these files right here.

This one is a really, really cool piece.

This is really super rare.

It's got silica, it's botryoidal.

This is gem quality.

You see how you can see in there and there's no big fractures or cracks in there?

- Yeah.

- Like it's super pretty, very clear.

You can put this to the sun if you was to cut this in slabs and you can see all the way through it.

- The whole thing is beautiful.

- Yeah.

This is just a beautiful little nugget here.

Here's a good example of some of our rainbow.

- And so there you can kind of see those serrations, why it might shatter if you were trying to work with it.

- And if he flips it over, you can see it raw.

That's what we found.

Just digging out here, - This is our Palladian stone, and you can see through it.

I mean you put it to the sun.

- Oh wow.

That is really cool.

And there's just that edge of blue on the one, that is really, really cool.

That's beautiful.

This is fluoride that a person can, if with a good specimen, make something from.

Whether it's jewelry or.

- [Guide] Absolutely.

Thank you guys so much for letting me come out and visit and letting me, you know, take a few samples.

It is phenomenal.

I can't believe how beautiful it is and, and just so rare.

I don't know if I can top what I've already found.

You guys are amazing.

Thank you so much.

There's one last stop that's a must for me when it comes to rockhounding.

So from Austin, we head west toward Reno and then onto Crystal Peak Mine, which is located just outside of the community of Verdi on the California/Nevada border.

Crystal Peak is a former quartz mine that is now managed by the US Forest Service.

At Crystal Peak Mine, I meet up with Taylor Wilson, a nuclear physicist and rock hounding enthusiast.

How better to learn about the area and quartz than from an accomplished scientist?

- So this is Crystal Peak, which is really a world class quartz deposit.

You find these really high purity, very clear crystals of quartz.

Quartz I think is actually like the second most common mineral on earth after spelled spar.

So pretty much anywhere you go and you walk around you'll find quartz.

But typically the quartz is little tiny crystals and they tend to have a lot of impurities in it.

They're not very clear quartz forms from a solution.

So it forms from magma or it forms from a hydrothermal solution of water with silicon and oxygen inside of it.

And here there were these unique conditions that allowed it to grow very slowly and cool off very slowly and grow these very large crystals of cords.

And over the years people have been, you know, fascinated by this.

1864, the town of Crystal Peak was established.

All these people came expecting to find gold and silver.

They didn't.

The town kind of transitioned over to being a timber town.

So they built a mill and logged timber from the surrounding hills.

It really was very boom and bust.

And it wasn't until World War II that people realized that the quartz here actually had some intrinsic value.

- So what's the value in, especially during wartime of quartz?

- Yeah, so quartz has this very unique physical property called Pizo electric Effect or Pizo electricity.

- I've never even heard of that before.

- Yeah.

It that basically just means that if you squeeze quartz, like as we're walking on it, it actually generates an electric charge.

The inverse effect is also true.

So if you put an electric charge onto quartz, it will actually expand and contract.

And that principle makes it very useful for keeping time.

- When you come out on location like this, what are you gonna be looking for as we look for samples?

- What's unique here is you can find these really nice high purity, very clear samples of quartz.

(uplifting music) This little cave that's been dug out here really shows that quartz forms in these pockets.

And the reason it forms in these pockets has to do with the formation process.

So keep in mind we're in this volcanic district here, so deep within the earth, different materials that make up the rock and make up the earth dissolve into fluids.

And that fluid is transported towards the surface.

And when it gets near the surface, it can cool down.

And when it cools down, the atoms and the elements that make up that fluid tend to start to fall outta solution.

They're no longer soluble.

And so they form these crystals, and if the conditions are right, if that fluid can cool slow enough and those crystals can crystallize slow enough, you get these really big crystals that form.

- Well, did you find anything good?

- A few things - I found some things I'm not sure about.

- There's a lot of milky quarts that's, you know, not really, I would say collector grade.

- I'm guessing this.

- Oh yeah, is closer to what- - That's probably the winner of the day.

Look at that.

You can really see the crystal planes.

- And then I found this little baby.

- Oh yeah.

See this one's terminated.

So you can actually see that's a full crystal that hasn't been broken.

And those are the crystal planes with the termination.

So it grew this way, and then you have a unbroken tip on it, which is really, really nice.

- [Narrator] My gym hunting adventure across the state is coming to an end.

But we have one last stop to round out the adventure.

We head to the Reno Gem and Mineral Society in Sparks to answer a burning question.

What's the next step for my tiny Treasures?

President Dean Sizemore greets me with some answers.

Dean, thank you for welcoming me here.

This is a lot of equipment.

What is the Reno Gem and Mineral Society all about?

- So we are about teaching adults and children about the earth sciences.

- I've been out to some great locations recently, and I have all of these little treasures and I don't know what to do with them.

So can you guys help me figure out what to do?

- Yes, absolutely.

That's exactly what we do.

So this is our slab saw.

This is how we begin the rock cutting process.

We'll cut them for you if you would like, but you can also take a class and then do it yourself.

- Is it dangerous to run a rock saw?

It sounds kind of intimidating.

- It's really not because once get it all set up, you're closing this lid or you're gonna be covered in oil.

It keeps the blade cool, it lubricates it so it can cut through the different stones.

'cause there's so many different hardness of rock.

So some take a long time.

They all pretty much auto feed.

So you just put it in, close the lid and then half hour, hour later you've got a slice.

- That's beautiful.

- Next thing with this is we take it over to the trim saw and we start cutting it down to the shape we want to get it to.

So this is a trim saw.

So this is where we now take our slab and we cut it down to a more usable shape.

(uplifting music) We try very hard to keep adding new classes.

We have some new equipment in now that we're playing with for fastening.

Some more like you do with a diamond, or emeralds, and things like that.

We're very open.

You do not need to be a geologist or have any experience.

In fact, sometimes I think it may be more fun if you have none.

'cause you get to come in and learn and explore, and learn how to do something that you never even realize you had an opportunity to do.

- Do you ever think you're getting tired of rocks?

- Oh no.

Never.

Because every time you find one, it's another surprise.

- As you can see, I'm back out here because this episode has really rocked, and even though I'm out of time, I'm ready for more rocks and more adventure.

If you wanna learn more about this episode or any of the "Wild Nevada" series, visit our website at pbsreno.org, or stream us with the PBS app.

Until the next wild Nevada adventure, I hope that you get to have some Nevada adventures of your own.

- [Narrator] Support for PBS Reno and "Wild Nevada" comes in part from the William N. Pennington Foundation.

Bill Pennington was an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and gaming pioneer who built a legacy of community service in Nevada.

This program is brought to you in part by the Connor Kent Robinson Giving Fund.

100 years of living in 28 years of life.

To give is Life's Real Gift.

- [Narrator] And by Millie Hopper and Millard Reed, Christine Perry, Thelma B. and Thomas P. Hart Foundation, Margaret Burback.

In memory of Sue McDowell, Mark and Susan Herron, and by individual members.