We arrived at Emerald Village around 2:00pm and bought a big bucket of muddy stones hoping to seek our fortunes and leave there filthy rich. It didn't exactly happen that way. The whole experience was worth more than money could ever buy though. Hannah absolutely loved it! We took the big bucket along with the shovels and our cups and found a spot on the flume to sift thru the rocks. Much to my surprise we found lots and lots of gems. I have been to several of these places since I was a kid and you normally only find a little chip or two of a gem if you are lucky. This time there were tons of gems in every scoop. We would take a little shovel full of rocks and empty them into the screen trays and let the water run thru and clean them off and pull out the gems. I concentrated mostly on the tiny ones myself. I picked out all I could find before discarding the white stones (the ones the experts working there told us were no good). After we finished the large bucket we each took our finds into the shop and the experts there laid them all out on trays and told us what all we had. NICE! Nothing was of real big value but there were lots of nice pieces. We found emeralds, quartz, garnet, amethyst, aquamarine, topaz, moonstone and all sorts of others that I can't remember the names of at the moment. It was a wonderful experience. Afterward they packed up all the stones we had collected in plastic bags for us to take home. Hannah was so thrilled with her gems. David and I were thrilled with our finds too. What a fun day!
some of our gems... David's cup on the left, Hannah's in the center and mine on the right.
