After returning home to Seattle after our first trip to the Sawtooth’s we were fired up by the aquamarines we had seen in the Boise rock shop. We began planning our next trip. We determined that we would try the other (south) side of Glens Peak. That area had been mentioned in Information Circular 7. We decided on a base camp at Heart Lake which was slightly south east of Camp lake which was the end of trail 461. I had a brilliant idea, based on the size of some of the cleaned out vugs that we observed on our first trip, that we should go at the full moon. This was so we could observe bats and hopefully find a vug/bat cave with giant crystals. We decided to go in late August to let the mosquito’s die down.
Finally the time of the trip was at hand. My previous partner Barry had been assigned to Japan so I had to find another crazy person. That person was Scott. Scott’s angle was the fly fishing. He wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about lugging a bunch of rocks for 16 -18 miles. However when I described giant cutthroats cruising around in crystal lakes under an azure sky he was in. We made the hike, as before, with an overnight approximately 2/3 of the way up the trail. Scott, being a studly type, wanted to do it all in one push. I convinced him the better course of action was to take it relatively easy and have a nice afternoon to sample the snakebite medicine and catch the cutthroats in the river.
By the time we finally made it to Heart lake Scott had caught some rock fever and after making camp we started to explore the basin between Glens Peak and Snowyside peak. We were only a few hundred yards outside camp when we found a little vug about 4 inches wide and 3 inches deep. It was mostly cleaned out but there were some micro mount clear beryl crystals in the pocket debris and a half inch smokey that was on the roof. That really fired us up. We didn’t go too far since we were recovering from the hike in and we had the full moon so we planned to do some bat hunting that evening..
By the way for those of you that haven’t had an opportunity to hunt crystal pockets I might recommend the Weather Channel TV program Prospectors. You can check it out by typing in Prospectors in the U-Tube search engine. The Sawtooth’s aren’t exactly Mount Antero but there are definite similarities, especially if you hunt the talus on the high peaks. That I do not recommend for reasons that will be obvious if you watch a couple episodes. It is much easier to cruise around in less steep terrain where there are still plenty of rock exposures. However you do want to hunt in areas that are more mineralized which means that the rock is more easily eroded. It is a balancing act.
The trout weren’t cooperating at Heart lake so we hiked over to Camp (Flytrip) lake and caught our dinner. The trout there ran about 10 inches long and were very cooperative. In the talus slide on the north side of the lake we couldn’t help admiring the very large vugs exposed right above the lake. Naturally they were all cleaned out. While fishing we decided focus our morning hunt on the basin between the peaks. This would allow us to hunt the SW side of Glens peak and get away from the trail areas which likely had seen more prospecting But first was the bat hunt. After a fine trout dinner we awaited the moonrise. It was an absolutely gorgeous evening relatively warm and dead still. The terrain in that basin is relatively open with the trees being spaced quite far apart so bushwhacking is relatively easy. Let me say now that I love hiking in the moonlight. It is magical! It was doubly so up there. We found a little ridge more or less trending in the direction we wanted to go and hiked slowly along it for a mile or so. We only saw two bats on the trip and they were out hunting bugs. No stream of bats out of a giant crystal filled cave for us. We parked ourselves over a mirror like lake and admired the moon and stars reflected in it’s glassy water. It would have been so romantic if Scott would just have been more my type (female). It had been a long day so finally we hiked back to camp and crashed.
The next two days we criss crossed that basin. We found little or nothing besides small vugs with smaller smokey’s. It was getting downright discouraging. As a pattern interrupt we decided to go fishing for giant cutthroats in Lake Imogene the next day. After a leisurely breakfast of trout we grabbed our packs and rods and headed off on a traverse of the south side of the mountain. We were traversing about 100 yards apart. We went maybe a quarter mile when I spotted a blue patch on top of a rock. I scrambled down to the rock which turned out to be about an 8 foot diameter talus boulder, It had an aquamarine geode right in it’s top. I blew my whistle to get Scott. When I climbed on top of the boulder it was obvious that somebody had beat us to the treasure. There was a bit of glove in the nearly perfectly hemispherical hole in the rock. It was lined with .5 - .75 inches of a deep blue beryl. Mad thoughts of spending the next several days chiseling out that cavity filled my brain before sanity came back. Scott came up and admired it. The hole was about 10 inches in diameter. I then noticed a small hole in a rock about 8 feet from the boulder. I pulled out my trusty screw driver and probed around. I pulled out a very nice little smokey quartz crystal with a 3/4 inch clear gemmy topaz perched on it. With a little more probing and a wee bit of pounding on the screwdriver handle I was able to pull out a hand size smokey plate. That plate had tiny clear topaz crystals perched all over it. The largest was maybe .1 inch long. Those seemed to be the only parts of the pocket lining that were not “tight”. The loose contents were gone except for the initial single smokey. I told Scott if we could find it again we would come back with our hammers which we had left behind since this was a fishing trip. We examined the surrounding area very carefully without finding anything else of specimen quality.
Scott dropped down to his traverse level and we started back on course to the lake. I had hiked maybe 150 yards when I hear Scott’s whistle calling me. I dropped down and hiked along for a bit and there is Scott looking into a nice big hole at the base of a big rock. I remember thinking it must not have been cleaned out as several others had been or Scott would not have whistled me in. When I stuck my head in the hole I realized we had hit a smokey jackpot if nothing else. The roof had a number of large smokey’s which were close together in a sort of waterfall formation. A little probing with the screw driver revealed that it was likely not going to be possible to get the “waterfall” out in one piece with the tools at our disposal. I started working it with the screwdriver and the specimens started coming out. We spent the entire day cleaning that pocket. We ended up with probably 80 pounds of crystals. They were not particularly gemmy. Nor was there any obvious interesting accessory minerals such as topaz or aquamarine. I did pull out a 5 inch smokey on a 5 inch orthoclase crystal. Still it was a good find! The pocket was not completely cleaned out when we left. At the back it turned upwards and narrowed. To get those much smaller crystals out properly would have required some serious chiseling to widen access or a proper pocket robber type bar. I told Scott we should leave some for the next party to find and we loaded up our packs with the crystals and staggered back to Heart lake. Actually the weight of the crystals wasn’t too bad but then we didn’t have our tents, stove, cooking gear, sleeping bags etc. It was pretty obvious that our packs were going to be heavier going out than coming in. The problem was we had planned the trip so we would have one more day to hunt, however if we couldn’t do the 16 miles out in one day then we would need to start one day early. It was Scott that had the hard stop and he had been a real sport about coming and found the big pocket to boot . I really hated to leave since we had found a very promising area of the mountain with both gems (aquamarine and topaz) and large pockets. But there is always another expedition to really strike it rich.
Our packs full of rocks were very heavy on the way out I can tell you. It was a very hot day as we got lower into the canyon. At our lunch break we were a couple miles short of where Barry and I had gotten to the year before. I reminded Scott that the last few miles were quite flat and suggested maybe we do the hike in two days. All he could think about was the steak dinner with some cold beer and a soak in the hot springs I had been telling him about. So we ground it out. We ran out of water a couple of miles from the trailhead which did not help. It was hot and my pack was really heavy on the flats. Finally we staggered into the parking area and threw off our packs. I always love that floating feeling when you have had a heavy pack on for a long time and you take it off.
We headed to the bar where we downed a couple of pitchers of beer and two excellent steaks. We grabbed a six pack and headed to the hot springs down by the river. The river had not been kind to the hot spring pool. High water had filled it in so that it was only 2 feet deep. Apparently nobody had bothered to clean it out. Some Butte miners came by and we sat under the stars and swapped lies about our finds. They also told stories about a town called Fish Trap Montana and the women there. Since this is a family site I can’t repeat them here. And so ended the second of three trips. Stay tuned for part three.
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Topic: Sawtooth Aquamarine Hunting - Trip 2 (Read 2834 times)