Sapphires, Part I

The hills surrounding my house are rich with gold and sapphires—especially sapphires.  During the construction of my house, while a contractor was pushing the stone-filled earth around with the blade of a crawler, I found a green sapphire about the size of a kernel of corn in the upturned earth.  In the knot of timbered gullies immediately north of my house is a place we call the Chinese Diggings.  The diggings are today rows and stacks of beautiful stone amongst the pines—painted sandstones, snow-white quartz, river-carved chunks of limestone, black stones, green stones, blue stones, and white-veined red stones.

Back in the late 1800s, the Chinese workers that toiled to construct the railroad lines through the Rocky Mountains also sought gold in these hills.  They made the lovely rows and stacks of stone while digging through the hills to find the loose gold in the mix of floodplain stone.  Rumors persist to this day that cursing Chinese miners dumped back into the stone piles whole buckets filled with the sapphires that kept clogged their sluice operation.

Not that implausible, really.  Back in the early 1990’s I worked briefly on the set-up of a gold and sapphire operation located on a grassy bench less than two miles from my house.  The operation churned through the bench (reclaiming the land as it advanced) and produced enough revenue from the sale of sapphires to pay for the fuel used by all the heavy equipment.  Several sapphire mines are still operating in the valley as I write this.

The photograph posted today is one I snapped of a few of the stones I have gathered in the hills around my home over the many years of my life.

--Mitchell Hegman