Benitoite Gem Mine story and information by Jay Bates
Down All the Days By Jay Bates
The mist hung on the hills, wafting in a cold wind blowing down the Diablo Range. We four huddled around our screens and kept moving to hold the in-creeping cold at abeyance. We were screening for that mythical gemstone benitoite. We were washing the dirt off tailings at the Gem Mine in hopes of a facetable stone.
Some weeks before we had been there on a warm and sunny day, basking in the warmth and the aroma of the surrounding incense cedars. It seemed much easier then to find those little electric blue crystals. Now it seemed they had all disappeared. Still, we soldiered on, for we knew not when we may be able to return to this remote location or whether we could even return to the land of Happy Meals over the sodden dozed tracks laughingly called roads on the maps.
The wash water ran out, so Dave and I put his hitch on the back of my Jeep and trailed the water tank trailer down to the creek bottom to pump it full from an underground tank placed there to collect water during to oncoming threatening winter rains. Now in four wheel, I crept back up the pit tracks to the top pulling a ton and half of wash water. All for a tiny blue speck that resembled a bit of blue glass, you would not think twice about picking up on the street.
