Shannon's US/LM Journal

[Shannon]

Been on a vacation for my birthday. I decided to go gem mining. Decided to do an experiment, too. Started off with no USLM. First day mining, I found one garnet crystal. Second day mining, used USLM for a few hours. Found 11.09 carats of sapphire crystals, two of them "cuttable" but barely so. Third day, I used USLM all day and noticed a dramatic increase in the amount of gem rough I found. I don't have the bags here with me to get specific, but I found tens of carats of ruby, tens of carats of sapphire, emeralds, moonstone, kyanite, amethyst, topaz, citrine and a whole lot of garnets. Hundreds of carats of garnets. I also found a native american pottery shard that I am told is 2,000 to 3,000 years old.

Today, we used USLM again, and this time, I found about many times as much of everything I found yesterday with the exception of garnet (only found one) and pottery (none). But this time, I found 554 carats of emerald rough (about 10x as much as yesterday), 30 carats of topaz, 94 carats of kyanite, 281 carats of moonstone in white, dusky blue and peach; 317.5 (!) carats of sapphires (4x as much as yesterday) and 431.5 (!!!) carats of ruby (about 6x as much as yesterday).

All in all, I'd say I did pretty well on the days I was using USLM, and its effects were increasing!

I have to say, I am surprised at this result.

First of happy birthday!!!!!

Thank you.

Sencondly, I didn't even know that you could go gem mining, that's so cool!!

There are places all around the world you can go gem mining. This trip, we focused on sapphires and rubies. Next time, we are going to probably focus on opal or diamond. It's just a matter of finding out what you want to find, and locating where you can go to mine it as a tourist.

Just FYI, there are two types of tourist gem mines. "Salted" and "unsalted". Salted is where they add gems and it's not native. They're enriched to ensure that you find something. We have specifically avoided "salted" mines, or, when we went to a mine that offered native and salted options, we always chose the unsalted gem dirt to mine. The only thing we ended up getting that wasn't native was some quarts that one mine added to their native dirt. But I don't care about quartz. Just in case you were thinking maybe the difference was explained by us going to unsalted mines first, and then salted mines.

If you get the opportunity would you mind sharing pictures of your haul?

I would love to. They're all packed in my luggage ready for us to return home, so I'll show you guys my haul when I get home. Probably going to be able to do that day after tomorrow.