How to Find Topaz Crystals at Topaz Mountain

[Music] hello and welcome once again to the rugged rock hound today i am here with utah rocks once again and we're at topaz mountain this is a place both of us know very well we've both been here many times and it's about time i made a video out here normally when i come here i'll go over into this area the west end of the bowl where you find red barrel crystals and it's the most commonly dug area today we both decided to go check out the v so the v is a place i haven't been to in a long time you can see it kind of makes a v over there in the valley right in the middle of the photo there right above my hat and we're gonna go look for some really good quality topaz crystals you don't usually find red barrels over there i did hear that somewhere up in the area you can find a zone with some red barrels i don't know where it is though and i don't probably want to spend my time today doing that let's go to the v and look for some good quality topaz crystals okay we are on our way hiking up toward the v as we're hiking i figured i'd give a quick history of the geology of this area and talk about how you find the good pockets of topaz out here at topez mountain so these uh hills that we can see around us these mountains are all volcanic layers of ash and flows of lava known as rhyolite and this occurred about two to three million years ago so at the time the mountains here kind of looked like what the cascades in washington are where you've got volcanoes going off and the volcanoes here deposited all these layers over hundreds of thousands of years worth of time building up into these mountains and as it started to cool down as they started to die off hot water and gas from down in the earth where there's still magma where it's still hot slowly bring minerals up to the surface and it just so happened that in this area the minerals sorry were following the road the minerals brought up were just sufficient to form topaz and other minerals like red barrel bixbyte pseudobrookites garnets things like that but mostly topaz so that's what you're looking for here is where those hot fluid systems and gases came up through the layers of rock to deposit here in the lava flow where you have gas bubbles so obviously you want to find gas pockets air bubbles where the crystals formed but they don't form just everywhere if you take a look out that way you'll see that some areas are lighter in color like a white other places look more red so where it's red it hasn't really gotten altered very much the hot water and fluids and gases that came up didn't really go through those zones so those are not a good place to look you want to look in more white areas especially back there we can see the white that's where you want to look because that is where the hot water and gas has bleached the rock and that's a good place to find topaz and other minerals now another thing you want to look for or what are known as vent structures so this stuff came up somehow and where it came up it formed a series of bubbles all interconnected where it deposited the crystals so when you're up here looking if you want to find a lot of good topaz you don't want to spend a whole bunch of time just breaking rock and finding little gas bubbles in the lava that have a few crystals in it you really want to find a vent structure and a vent structure can be anywhere but you'll know it because it'll be an area where the rock is softer and it's just a series of chamber after chamber after chamber usually bubbles that are bigger than the bubbles you normally see hey look topaz crystal right there see a nice little clear one yeah that's a good size actually of course we're looking for the yellow ones which we'll have to dig for and another way that really helps you find these vent structures is looking at plants so if you look at the trees and bushes in order for them to find a place to grow they need to find soil that's more loose that has open spaces maybe more sandy and guess what sometimes that's where the vent structure is so following the plants can help you get an idea of where you might find some crystals all right we made it to the v here you can see this light colored white going through here this is the zone where we should find some good topaz in the book it talks about this space this spot particularly but you can find anything all through here and even up this way too so here's the zone it's up to us where we want to give it a shot all right walking up a little further this might be promising maybe i can split some of that off and that looks like a good spot there i'm gonna check that spot really quick didn't find much down there where i was looking came up here found this piece that was had a fracture going through it and it is about to come off you can see the crack going all the way through it i thought you might like to see it as it comes off slowly see if there's anything behind it [Music] nothing just tiny air bubbles see that's unfortunate all right i've come back a bit further nice view out across the ball and came over here and i saw this there's a bush then there was a nice little kind of structure here and these were fairly loose so i figured i'd go ahead and pry them loose um in the back when i was pulling some things out there were a few crystals mostly just sandy things but maybe yeah that one's got some clarity to it and so i started pulling this out this all collapsed so i'm probably gonna sift through that dirt for any crystals but these are about to go so let's film that all right anything in there would have fallen out into here so we'll have to check that it does look like there's some pockets along the side here comes this one i don't want it to go down until i just want to stop right here [Music] it's like mostly a bunch of tiny pockets [Music] okay let's see what's in here sandy crystal sandy crystal i'm gonna get very good clear stuff right here sandy crystal that was a little bigger i can't tell if it's just all sandy though yeah they might all be sandy but we'll clean them off to be sure they might actually be clear just they're just covered in dirt need to be washed off all right so we were over there two bridges over and it's just too sandy over there the crystals so we came over here to see if they're clear and they do seem to be clear and i found this rock that seems to have broken off naturally you can already see some of the exposed pockets and there's this exposed pocket and this is what i pulled out so far ah too bad that one wasn't still yellow but we've got some yellow stuff coming out and the pocket's going that way let's see what we can find [Music] okay this is where i think we're getting to the edge because the crystals are all stuck to the side there was a loose rock right here and i broke it off and look at the bottom of it got a pocket right here right there so i'll see what i can find on that side all right broke another rock off and found that okay getting a little better i've been going along i've hit a few different little places found a few little crystals not a whole lot um i found this that was loose and popped it off and i pulled these two crystals out i'll get them cleaned up at home so you can see them but they're looking much better and i think i see a large one right here that's about to come out there we go okay got it out so it's really dirty you can't really see anything right now i have to get it washed up i walked up here and i saw that look at that and look at this wow that's some topaz all right i'm gonna poke around and see if i can find a spot in here somewhere all right i've been hammering for a bit and i think this whole section is about ready to go already got that part off okay set you up so you can watch as i knock it off there she goes maybe there's a big pocket in the back this big pocket right here question is is there anything in it because the crack was there and it might have escaped but we'll dig through it and see if we can find anything oh ho ho ho look at that that's a nice crystal there's another nice one in my hand there [Music] okay i'll put them on this little ledge here oh this could be good one oh look at the size of that thing on the bottom too bad it's stuck all right we also got some other pockets around here too okay i might want a glove on just in case there's somebody living in there there's one all right i'm gonna put the camera down it's hard to uh do this holding it oh oh oh oh look at the size of that cluster that's what we're looking for oh that just made my day oh we'll get that cleaned off there we go okay what else we got in this pocket here oh there's one okay that was nothing all right nothing there going oh see i wish i would have brought a stick for digging there's one there it looks sandy though yeah this pocket's really opening up see look at the size of that thing oh yeah there's a tip of one it's like the edge of the pocket with a few little crystals on it hey i'm not sure if you can see that there's some crystals right on the side right there [Music] oh yeah there you go that's good looking one right there oh yes ha there's a long one another one ah there's one look at that heading back to the vehicle there's utah rocks right in front of me he has no idea what i found yet he doesn't know that i'm in that nice pocket so we'll surprise him oh that's so big that's going to be cool when you get it cleaned up i know the problem was very dirty ahead because it was a crack in the back of the rock so water gotten down with dirt those are big here's the big one oh my gosh look at that one that is big oh so happy i was so excited i found that pocket and that'll be cool when you clean it next time we do choose to go up there i'll take you to that spot i was at it looked somewhat untouched because then every now and then there was this exposed pocket that hadn't been touched we're gonna head out now it's time to get heading back it's halloween yeah gotta get the kids out and enjoy halloween and it'd be nice to get back to my wife and we can enjoy halloween that is an interesting looking cloud it looks like a comb or a hairbrush with a bunch of hair on it made it back from topaz mountain got all the specimens cleaned off right here ready to show let's go ahead and take a nice good close-up look at them here they are so we'll start with the sandy crystals this right here is the stuff i was pulling out when i was going sandy crystal sandy crystal yeah got quite a few of those unfortunately still they're kind of nice in their own way just take a good look at all these here we have some of the smaller crystals that i pulled out at different places so a lot of the little yellow ones even got some decent clear ones colorless then here's the nicer yellow ones i was pulling out of that pocket this was that big one right at the beginning pulled that out of the pocket it was nice and here are the clusters that i found so that one and that one and of course the really big one i was excited about ah it's a little sandy that's too bad but still overall pretty nice yeah so that is what i found on this trip i've had better definitely had much better but overall it was a pretty good pretty good dig that is it for today's video i hope you really enjoyed it i had a great time at topaz mountain out with utah rocks sorry about the noise they're doing concrete over there and i hope to see you on the next video remember there's treasure everywhere [Music]

Channel: The Rugged Rockhound

Views: 6,093

Keywords: rockhounding, mining, crystals, minerals, rocks, fossils, stones, geology

Id: Zi8_5pIG7nI

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021