Digging out a $200K aquamarine pocket on Mt. Antero | S1:E4

[Music] it's just like anything you know you have to develop a market have a great product we're always optimistically aware that it could stop at any moment and have a three four year dry run so every mining season is imperative that we hit keep our reserves up and just make sure the operation stays fluid and the guys are happy [Music] [Music] we don't want to be a break-even operation we want to get you know far into it to where it's profitable so with the snow patch Road construction we're looking long-term that's one of those extended projects that's going to take many years so the focus has to stay on the North Face where we're producing and stay where the money is I'm looking forward to making future investments but it really depends on how much pockets material we can get out and I think the guys have done really good but the sense of urgency right now is very high times ticking so we're really excited I got the ivory crew up here they've just joined the team and the rotation up here of all my rock hounds guys are really motivated they telling me to get a lots of blue so this is going to elevate everybody's game and we got different teams trying to tackle different areas and these guys came to dig we're gonna pop them on the North Face they know how to surface collect check for surface float signs or pocket chasers I'm pumped man [Music] [Music] my name is Justin and I'm up here at Mountain taro I've been prospecting for about three years bo has been a big outdoor person love getting outside and things all kind of came together when I came to Colorado and started to explore the mineral Kingdom here and it's just so inspiring excited to be here our strategy is to work together as a unit to find the best most efficient ways to hit good pockets of minerals mmm yeah yeah I'm gonna come down to the trip it right here so basically today we're opening up some new ground yesterday we were digging deep finding some great material but it was just frozen it's real hard and difficult to work with but we can expose during the day with good sunlight overnight just refreezes so we jumped about a hundred feet up and we're starting to get into some a little bit better material looking for this pegmatite but you can see a nice line of this fluorite going through it that's a good indicator that we're on some good material so we're gonna get down a little deeper and see what we find [Music] so far there's some fun I've been working on for since I've been digging with these guys is creating a nickname for everybody it's just something that I find personally and individually their skill sets are talents we call Tim the tractor cuz you just move so much ground and every time I look over at Matt he's mucking a hole so that one just came to me so I'm at the mucker tim-tim the tractor I'd say it I'd like to be the extractor but haven't quite got there yet so it's getting there so you know we dig all sometimes few hours before we actually hit some of the darker material a bit more I like to call it sherbert it's like stuff something you see that ice cream shop pretty good boys world-class aqua topaz Smokies feldspars all the great Colorado material comes from right here and we're here to pull out the best of the best you know we've spent a lot of time energy effort and expense and now the pressures on us to hit these pockets we want to find amazing gems and and and open those up but sometimes just mother nature is tough to deal with and not to mention just that the altitude of salt can get a little challenging I'm starting to acclimate a little bit more down in the Rocklin it in there oh yeah buddy yeah you're on it it's uphill but that's alright we can tractor straight up that's a cool company peg right there yeah that's gorgeous it's just amazing how fast that changes looks like nothing that you'd ever want to touch to some no get your heart racing I think we're on placed on pace to hit something pretty good today it's just gonna take a little more time to go deeper than we were down there so go a little deeper just dig a little deeper and we'll get there that gorgeous is poisonous we could be sitting on a 50 carat stone [Music] yeah I say let's dig let's keep digging so today we just got up here to the Blue Star claims we're at 14,000 feet weathers beautiful today's focus is on my Jim clay so I'm in a really good zone right now and I'm about to get my digging tools out and see what I can find this looks like a great spot right here I'm gonna start digging right here we got some good pegs zones we've got some good clay and I'm getting after it [Music] so what Jim clay is a smectite clays and all the minerals that are coming out of pocket formation it's the only one zone that has this kind of clay and all the minerals in it and it's not all over the mountain it's only in the pocket zones it's very very big part of our business gonna be looking through here but it's still pure ice I'm afraid all this right here it's pure ice everything right here is pure ice this ground is really frozen right now in the permafrost is everywhere so I'm gonna get my excavator operator I'm gonna have him take a big scoop and I think we're gonna have all the clay that I mean get right here hold right here the excavator is our most expensive resource up here so every scoop in every place that we have him dig is very specific we have him dig in the wrong spot you know then we're just wasting our time and we're wasting our money and we're basically screwed he did about three scrapes so now I'm gonna get in and look I'm all the Jim Clay's here I can feel that it's still really frozen I'm gonna see if I can find anything so I still have to take it really slow because I'm still nursing myself back to health from my accident [Music] have to be super careful and every step around here is life-threatening for me because just one bad fall and my diaphragm could explode again and I'm off the mountain [Music] just seen an accident - on our way up there was a car that had flipped over and it's just to see that that's a good reminder of how dangerous up here so we have to really watch that as well oh look here's the tip of the aquas right here so I know they're here and those are good and the nice color looks pretty Jimmy so I have to clean them up just to see how Jimmy they are but if they look good get that pegmatite right there Jim plays right here and the hawk was gonna be right here as well so we're excited so excited [Music] those right there right there save adder up here we've been finding a lot of stuff today huh phew Boulder I swear you just want to roll them right off the cliff and then you get the chucker right and then my favorites just leave her right over there so it's about all we're finding other than a few Smokies but yeah we'll keep rolling them down there challenges all these rocks are hard to move with the shovel offer this beautiful gems this material that's pegmatite it's that's looking pretty darn good that's what I chase right into a pocket of beautiful Friday there we go again it's so unstable yeah not a whole lot you can do just keep digging [Music] there's nothing like it in the world pulling out crystals that are older than dinosaurs they've never seen the light of day and you're basically giving them birth into the world if you're the first living organism that's ever really actually encountered it it's just amazing all right been chasing these little pockets like this with all this color it looks phenomenal it's got the peach it's getting white it's got smoky that's all what you really want to see I've been chasing this all day yesterday see if it's all no it's not but it's still amazing indicator so it's got the mineralization happening it's doing what you want there's more smoky that I was on the right track and that I was surrounding myself too easy to get let down sometimes you think you find this smoky and you get a piece of like mica or leftover Marmot goodie so we're starting to pull out these decent chunks of microcline feldspar once you start getting into that more mineralization that shows you're in a pegmatite and potentially closer to hitting a vein or a pocket of some sort probably one of the better indicators better than quartz in my opinion that's a beautiful smoky oh my god man that made my day that's so awesome oh that's great pockets full of Smokies the pocket we're still looking for Jim clay and I'm gonna keep on walking and looking for it all day long this is the stuff this is the best of the best of the best of the Jim clay I cannot believe it we are gonna be bagging all of this up I'm so excited you're on the blue officially yay it's gorgeous we'll find it blue aquamarine that's just caked up Jim play play right here and this is the brown all of this is Jim play every single bit of this is Jim clay blue format from the top down I know but there's blue right here - oh look oh my gosh look you got your classic blue peg running through here yep there's blue coming through here all through here - yep that's the color on that get your blue right here you got a good show look at this believe it's coming out right here okay it's going down oh my gosh wow it's like the perfect day to dig up here it's a good piece look at the color yeah dr. dey yes we start bagging up some of this stuff I think this is gonna be a two or three day project we need egg ready on this yeah we need to melt this out a little bit but she's definitely opened up the cap here got great formation it's intact it's it's it's a nice hard rock situation came up here just to look for my Jim clay and lo and behold did I find the pocket so I'm super excited I call it my miracle pocket my first one since the accident and I'm gonna put the dig ready mats on these pockets to melt the firm cloth super excited and getting ready to go back to that debt hole I was digging and all of a sudden I looked down where they had just recently scraped we looked down and it was all blue and it was a bunch of material and you could just see ice cubes a blue sitting there I just I'm an aren't on my mind says blown this is absolutely incredible oh yeah that's some tartar that is oh my god you're holding 15 to 30 grand right there gorgeous gorgeous piping gorgeous routine sitting there so Mike where you're at with your needle all those rocks back well I would start yeah yeah you start pulling all that back when your turn now that's a beautiful aqua some of the most amazing color gorgeous picture Oh everywhere in there so yeah we're going to take it slow get down into the layers hopefully find some matrix pieces that's where the real value is okay so if we can get a pocket formation that's intact that's your money [Music] correct [Music] it's only gonna get better for me right this could be the million-dollar pocket some of the deepest blue that I've ever seen it's below the trend where it's well-protected so the geology is unaltered you know the crystal formation there's no itching at all in its classes blue blue blue and there's just bags and bags of it it's crazy we're running out of bags actually you can't use heavy equipment here it's picks shovels screwdrivers toothbrushes scrapers you know we're just intricately moving down into the lair this is looking intact [Music] Wow that's really starting to come to that's the other part of that piece all right so we've got reconstructed with crystals here electric-blue this this is some of the blue stop I've ever seen that's awesome that's what we're looking for [Music] which list here we go that's a nice extraction it's free that's a good one yeah that's jammy secure but man the other side of this absolutely gorgeous right there it's got a fracture line running right through at the bottom but it's a beautiful specimen let's go three inches on this side to right there and let's go under and feel that and peel back and see if we can get under that matrix we may be able to hand lift that out we're doing right now is creating a seam we're going to get around the side of the pegmatite where the Aqua is coming out of it in the matrix so if we can get a little hook and use these what we call scratchers it'll get down in there and you can use that that tip and just pry it and it'll pull that piece of peg no ties [Music] [Music] it's dots it's not stopping so we've got great great exposure and more matrix it's awesome so this one looks like it's gonna be another clicker just gonna really take my time with it there's the click it just came apart here clicking it's like they're long as you Mike and then here's here's the rest of it there it is there it is the rest of the Mike it's a quad piece [Music] [Music] my key we're going to take a speed better the dump truck it's gonna start smelling here and Justin we might want to put some stuff in the truck oh my gosh hey man oh my god man shut the front door [Music] oh my god cow look at that would you just what a day boys oh my god and ladies Wow that is freaking amazing [Music] speechless No gosh it's still okay well the hardest part of it all stop we probably got four or five thousand carats I got a good feeling we're just on the top of it Sumitra she's gonna get some of this material off the hill the guys are gonna keep mining we're going to start getting these cleaned up get them laid in the collectors baby clicker baby Flickr babe clicker babies flipping excited and it's still producing so we don't want to leave but it's snowing and it's just getting miserable at paranal high altitude hazard is whether vehicle is going to be sliding going down so we're going to try to get ahead of it we've got pockets all up and down the seam here we're gonna let the miners kind of closeout button everything down and let's get home so right now we're taking the time to to cover the pocket just in case because you never know which claim jumpers up here big and there's nothing it's up here with binoculars that like to watch us see where we're digging and then watch us when we leave and then come to our spot so we fully bury it so they have a whole lot of mucking out to do if they want to try and steal our pocket well I'm old man winter's coming Leibert better hurry up and get down [Music] oh wow that's really cool it's got the crust we just got done off the mountain and we were hitting a killer pocket and we we end up bagging the stuff that kind of mill to the sides because we missed so much because it's all covered in clay it's all it's all dirty right so this crystal right here incredible they just pulled this out right there right there that bad boy that's that's easily that's $1,000 right there that's good nickname that we give to the stones that are kind of broken that fit back together and when they click back together perfectly we call them clickers so it's pretty cool you know it shows that that the pocket structure was at one time kind of prismatic you know whatever broke up the crystal it remained pretty close to its proximity so you're able to kind of with a little bit of geometry and a little bit of patience you can place this stuff back together and it increases the value you know threefold so yeah I always like to have you guys go through the material and see if we got any clickers you know the Smokies are the other end of the spectrum of the aquas but just as beautiful prismatic like we'll keep this as a specimen that's a beautiful piece [Music] yeah [Music] we're kind of stunned at the day production on what's carries I don't think it's even started to play out just a rough guesstimate I'm thinking 4,500 carats easy these big clear pieces you know these are five thousand dollar bills these these are just rare and some of the collectors they're gonna go nuts when they see this because the electric-blue that you're getting is quite frankly we've never seen it everybody was looking for this yeah they all want this color yeah it's a special pocket very exciting it's been totally unpredictable and can't wait to do it every season proud of my team it's been a great year trying at times and all the crews really delivered each team hit pockets we're in a great zone we've opened up to other zones snow Pat's South Face we're just really platformed in and poised to take it to the next level [Laughter] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Mount Antero Treasures Productions

Views: 875,976

Keywords: Prospecting, mining, aquamarine, gems, minerals, Colorado Rockies, Rocky Mountains, Mt. Antero, Outdoor adventure, Prospectors, Fourteeners, miners, birthstone, topaz, aquamarine jewelry, rockhound, collegiate peaks, mt Princeton, 14'er, hiking, mt white, thrill seeking, crystals, colorado state gem, mining claim, rockhounding, mount antero, off road trails, gemstone collecting, how to mine for gemstones, mining techniques, smokey quartz, how to prospect for gems, gem hunting

Id: wPnovs-Q-WI

Length: 28min 29sec (1709 seconds)

Published: Sun May 03 2020