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.
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!
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