Well, we are back and alive. We didn’t fall off any mountains and managed to find a few great places to hunt gems.
Our trip started Wednesday night by heading up out of the Atlanta area to my step-daughters house. She lives about 60 miles north of the metro area and that helped to put us out of the high volume traffic areas for the next morning. We left her house at 6:30 am after a semi-sleepless night (small bed, house too hot for our tastes, etc).
We took a side trip the the BIL’s house in SC, just 20 miles over the border from Clayton, GA. We stayed and chatted with him for about and hour or so and he helped us with a back road trip through the mountains to our first destination, Spruce Pine, NC. It was a beautiful ride through the Chattahoochie National Forest and Sumter National Forest. It was just starting to bud up there and the apple orchards hadn’t started blooming yet (more on this later in my trip tale.) Everything was green and the temps were perfect… around the low 70′s. We rode with our windows open and truly enjoyed the fresh mountain air.
The trip up the mountain side to Spruce Pine… I have resized this a little as it was taken with my cellphone and it is distorted some at the normal YouTube size vids.
We made our first stop at Gem Mountain and it ended up being where we should have stayed the entire trip, but more on that later. For the rock enthusiast… Gem Mountain is where you want to go. We will continue to go there from now on and not waste time on other “famous” locations. They had not opened their mine trips yet; they take you on a 4 hour trip to the actual mine. We stayed at the sluices and bought our buckets that have been salted (loaded with gems) and sluiced to our hearts content. Hubby has done this before and he said he had never seen buckets that bountiful before.
Our first bucket was the $80 special that comes with one free cutting. 2 hours later we were loaded with some pretty large specimens. Just to give you an insight to what we had available to hunt for in the sluices: Ruby, sapphire, tourmaline, aquamarine, smokey quartz, rose quartz, emeralds, amazonite, alexandrite, Citrine, amethyst, topaz, clear quartz, Iolite, florite, moonstone, garnet, advernturine, amatrine and kyanite. We found all of these in that first bucket and some that were huge pieces. We bought a couple more smaller buckets (20.00) with the kid doing a ruby bucket and the hubby and I going through another (forgot now what we sluiced LOL). The kid found ruby and garnet mainly in his and he found one ruby that was probably about 40 karats in the rough! We called it a day and went to check in at the Inn.
Using the BIL’s map that he had given us we found our way to the wonderful old Inn that I had found on the net. Pinebridge Inn used to be an old high school and was turned into an inn in 1982. The rooms were quaint but they still smelled like an old school… it is funny how that smell can stick in a building that long. My only complaint is that the beds were doubles and not fullsize. With three of us and 2 that snore (ahem)… we all lost some sleep that night.
More to come! Stay Tuned!
Well, I have to say that the pictures are gorgeous, and it sounds like you had a wonderful time. I hope you got to relax and shed some of the stress that you carry.