Topaz Mountain

Topaz Mountain is on a small mountain range in southwest Utah. It's near a place called Delta and it's pretty much in the middle of nowhere. You can see from the map below where it's located (indicated by the Red A). For some perspective, our house is basically in between Tooele and Sandy on the map.

We decided to take a weekend camping trip to Topaz Mountain because a friend from work recently went there and came back with some great stories. It's called Topaz Mountain because you can actually find topaz there! Lots of it! It's also got all kinds of other gems there as well.

When I brought the idea up to Ramin, Chris and Tara they all got excited about it - Ramin especially. He found a book online written just about Topaz Mountain and when he went to go pick up the book from the seller on eBay, he found out the seller was also the author! So he was able to get a few inside tips on the best way to find gems! 

We discussed when we should go and at first I thought that Memorial Day weekend would be a great time because of the time off, but Ramin quickly retorted that it would probably be really crowded. So we settled on the weekend BEFORE Memorial day. Chris and I left work early on Friday so that we could pack up and go.  I posted a few pictures in my last post of all the stuff we loaded into the truck.  Here's the rest of the story - I didn't take as many pictures as I'd like, but it will give you the idea.

Chris and Tara were in charge of handling the breakfast and dinner while I handled the lunches. Tarar's family has a lot more camping supplies than we did so she borrowed their Camp Chef set up and we brought our propane tank. This was the morning after we arrived. Chris and Tara both helped to make really awesome breakfast burritos with eggs, bacon and sausage. It was good fuel for our long day ahead!

This is one angle of our camp that Ramin took. Our tent is the grey and green one. Chris and Tara's tent is the red one behind the truck.

The place where you want to be in Topaz Mountain is where we were, in the bowl. All around us we were surrounded by high hills. This is one view of it. We had some boy scouts next to us the first night out.

Another view of the breakfast cooking with Ramin in the picture. Chris also had a cool canopy we set up to keep our stuff under. We needed it because we got rained on pretty hard both nights we camped! The morning to early afternoon  was nice and sunny, and then it turned to rain again.

This was the potty tent that Chris bought. We bought a portable toilet seat just for camping and Tara insisted that we also have this tent for privacy - I think it was well worth it! It wasn't too bad either, much more sanitary than public bathrooms sometimes.

This is what Chris and Tara's tent looked from the front - it had a pretty good rain shield around the front door.

The specific campsite we chose was kind of cool - previous occupants had built us a fire pit AND created this rock formation.

We started out on our all-day journey around 9am I think. We had to climb pretty high up the mountain to get to the right place - with the white rock...that's where you find the gems!

As you can see from my angle, we did climb pretty high and it was steep in many places. I got a nice rock burn from sliding down at one point. Here is Tara trying to maneuver.

Chris and Tara. This was the place where all of us were able to find a lot of Topaz...both brown and clear. Topaz naturally starts out as brown, but it turns clear as it's exposed to the sun. So the clear stuff is less valuable than the brown, even though it's just as brilliant!

This was the first wash we climbed up to get up to the high place. Here are Chris and Tara coming down. We were up there pretty high!

There were three specific areas that Ramin wanted to search and they were all separated by deep washes, meaning we'd have to climb and down to cross over to the next one. Here is Ramin trying to navigate the easiest way for us to move. As you've noticed from the pictures, we were all carrying stuff. The guys carried tools like chisels and hammers and picks. They also switched off carrying the mini cooler with our lunch so that we didn't have to go all the way back to camp to eat. I also carried more supplies and water in my backpack.

This is a view from one of the places we were crossing over. It's a good view of the bowl we were in. You can see trucks down there indicating camp sites as well as the dirt road.

 Surprisingly, there were wild flowers growing everywhere! There should be I guess with the amount of rain we saw!

Here we are up at the third site. This was high climbing! You can see all of the white rock - called Rhyolite - and it was brittle and slippery to walk on.

Tara made it over somehow to that rock, but at this point you can tell from the sky that it was going to rain soon. She stayed in that spot for a while because she was afraid to come down...it's easy to slide down fast up there.

There was another group of people across the wash from us digging as well. This shows another great view of the bowl we were in and how high up we had climbed.

Chris took a break to observe the other people and look at the view.

Ramin was the only brave one to keep climbing. We had all perched down a bit lower and weren't having any luck finding more gems. You can see from this picture how tough it was to climb up there, basically on all fours.

Ramin found a good place where he was finding lots of gems, but none of us were brave enough to climb up there with him...and then it started raining. We decided to leave him up there to dig while we were back down to secure the camp - the rain always brought tons of wind so we had to secure things again.

We went down to camp and secured everything and of course, the rain only lasted a little bit. We were all pretty tired so we all took a nap for a bit and by the time we woke up it was nice and bright outside again. It had been a few hours and Ramin still wasn't back, so I decided to take off and head back to where we were last. I decided to use the telephoto lens on the camera to help identify where Ramin was. In this picture you can make out the red cooler! I was at the trail below and zooming up to find the cooler - so you can tell how far I had to climb. I also had to find the exact wash and path to get up to that spot again.

I walked and walked and I finally got a point where I could yell to Ramin. Here he is waving at me, super zoomed in!

And here is the same picture, zoomed out a bit more.

And finally, this is completely zoomed out. this really gives you the perspective of how far away he was and how far I still had to climb.

Finally, I got to the point where I was close enough to Ramin that he could walk down to meet me. I turned around and saw this fantastic view of the bowl and the valley beyond. If you look close enough you can see the smoke stack of the power plant out in the middle of nowhere!

With the telephoto lens I was able to do a cool closeup of our campsite! It almost looks fake.

This is the same shot, only zoomed out!

Ramin came down the wash with his findings in hand!

That night a bunch of campers in the place played with their laser pointers, including Chris - his was the green one. The mountain walls made for a great place to do a light show - it was really fun!

The laser pointer also made our fire smoke look really cool too!

On Sunday we had to head back home, but we stopped at the Dugway Geode Beds on the way. We weren't sure what we were doing so we just looked for places other people had dug holes and the boys started doing at it.

We knew we had to find egg shaped rocks and break them in half to find the geodes, Chris is trying to break open a rock here.

We gave up on that area because we weren't making much progress....so we drove into the area a little further and happened upon a GREAT place to find geodes. We found a BUNCH here...Tara found the best one of all.

I have not yet had the chance to take pictures of all the cool gems and rocks we found. We still need to clean them all up and spend some time with them. It's been very busy for the last week making our final preparations from our trip to Seattle and Vancouver. I don't think I'll be able to post pictures of our gems until after the other trip is done...but I will get it done before the end of the summer - I hope!

April & May Camera Photos

I have LOADS and LOADS of pictures to share. They are very random of course, but they're representative of my life these days! I'll start where we left off from my last post!

My boss Misty quit eBay during the second week of April. It was a VERY sad time for all of us on her team, so we all decided to make her something unique from all of us. I made her a hand-made felt wall hanging. Jenn Fairbanks made her a blanket and a pillow. Charlie got her a gift certificate to go and paint (she loves that). Brandon made her a fun video featuring all of us - it really was awesome. And Shaun made this:

We call of those little sayings "Misty-isms" because they're things she says all of the time...and we tried to make the facial expression of how she would really say them. It's sort of an inside joke for all of us but we thought it was hilarious and so did she! Shaun did a great job of putting it all together nicely.

I'd had a plant for a few years that never really seemed to thrive because it was in a horribly small basket and it just wasn't good. So recently I upgraded it to a larger pot and moved it to a better location. As you can see from this picture taken in mid-April, there was a point where THREE peace lilies were growing from it! It was amazing!

Ramin ordered a puzzle online somewhere of London...ancient London to current London and it was a 4D puzzle (meaning it captured time as well). So here's the ancient map of London - Ramin did all of the work here.

And here's the puzzle when it was completed with all of the 3D buildings! Pretty awesome! We love London so much - can't wait to go back some day!

I've been trying to interact a lot more with my two parakeets lately. Here's a recent snapshot I took of them. 

On April 21 I tried my hand at making stuffed peppers. This was the first time I'd ever made them, and I LOVED them. But I made so many that I think I tired myself out of them already, on just the first try!

Dingo and I have been doing more and more walks now that the weather has finally gotten nicer! I take a lot of photos while walking wit him.

Ramin and I went out together one morning and when I turned around to look back in our room I found this:

My pregnant friend Genevieve bought my gift card to a place called Color Me Mine for Christmas. At the beginning of May we finally headed over there and spent a few hours painting some cute things! I painted the little gnome and she painted the fish and added her baby boy's name on it!

We had to wait a few days for them to be fired, but here's how mine turned out! I love it. We're going back in June to do some more - I'll get the guy gnome so mine (Henrietta) can have a friend (Henry).

I don't know what we're doing right but the anemone in our saltwater fish tank is growing massive and actually puffing out all of his tentacles.

I have so many plants in my house...one day I need to document all of them or something. Here's what my spider plant looked like before I cleaned him up. I gave away three large baby plants to friends at work. The rest I planted outside!

 One more I realized that I take a lot of pills every morning. They're not medications, they're mostly all supplements and vitamins to make me in optimum condition to get pregnant. Only the large white pills are true medication - Metformin to control my insulin resistance caused by PCOS.

A few weekends ago Ramin and I finally finished up the Spring cleaning outside. I got all of the flowers planted, we got the yard in good condition and we cleaned out our garage. I also cleaned the wheels of my car that day too!

The cafeteria at my work is actually REALLY good. This was one day where we had taco salad!

My tulips were disappointing this year. These were about the only ones I saw - most of them didn't do anything beyond sprouting. I'll need to look into what I can do next year.

Another shot of the walk Dingo and I take in the little canyon in our neighborhood.

I love when our big front tree blooms. It looks so much better now that we trimmed him up!

These orchids were AMAZING. I saw them in the grocery store around Mothers Day and I wanted one of them SO badly because they were so brilliant - but they were also $30 and I literally do not need any more plants :P

I try to reserve my baby-making conversations for my personal blog, but I have to share this picture. No, it's not a positive pregnancy test, it's a positive Ovulation Predictor Kit or OPK as we say in the TTC world (trying-to-conceive). When I see that smiley face every month it's super exciting for me because it's the only positive thing I get to see ever :P

In preparation for our trip to Mount St. Helen's next week - I've been trying to work on the stair master at the gym at work. On my first round I did it for 15 minutes straight and climbed 546 stairs!

This is what the dang machine looks like! It's a beast...this last week I stayed on for 20 minutes, did 670+ steps and climbed 43 flights of stairs!

Another day walking with Dingo. We climbed to the top of the hill and I took this picture of the Wastach Mountains. I love that view!

This was the same walk with Dingo. I made the mistake of going in the middle of the day and the poor thing got overheated. I found some shade for us and let him rest for a bit.

Every time I made the bed, this little punk comes in and moves the sheets and curls up in my spot! One of these days I need to secretly video tape her doing it!

We have two lilac bushes and a large snowball bush in our front yard. I trimmed some flowers off and put them in a vase. Neither of those bushes bloom for very long so I'm glad I have this picture!

This is my shaded front porch pot. The flowering plant is super cute and I've also got some ground cover in there that will hopefully start hanging over the end of the pot.

Can you believe that this is our backyard rose bush?!? Look at the colors of those leaves! I can't wait till this guy starts blooming roses!

This is another of my front porch flower pots. I think I did good job choosing some variety and color!

This is the lilac bush I trimmed from.

And this is our snowball bush!

Two weeks ago we all headed over my mom's house to move my old Avenger into her garage so some workers could come and trim a large tree in her backyard. I was afraid that the Avenger might not start and we'd have to push it to move it...turns out it just needed a battery jump and the engine fired right up! Sitting in that car made me very nostalgic - I still love that car very much. I'm glad it's in the garage now though...it needs some protection.

I'll post more pictures of our actual camping trip later, but here's what our preparation for the trip looked like. The place we went to literally had NO facilities, so we had to take everything with us, including lots of water!

Ramin had a tough time fitting it all in there but we were able to get everything organized in the bed of the truck!

Here's a quick pic I took of Ramin when we were in our tent getting ready for bed. He was reading his book on the gems were going to hunt for!

And finally, I took this just yesterday at work. When my boss Misty left eBay, I took waited a few weeks and then moved into her old desk because it was near the window.  Charlie sits right near me and it's easy for him to wheel over and talk to me through my little desk window. My plant kept getting in his face and I decided he looked funny so I had to take a picture. He made the funny face on purpose!