First Days in Idaho

Our first day in Idaho we went to visit the opal mines in Spencer, Idaho. Unfortunately you can’t go up to the mines. You only get to see pictures. Bummer!  The shop we went into is a family run business. The husband does the mining and processes the opals.  The wife mounts the stones and runs the shop.  They had several really unique pink opals that were gorgeous. They also had pieces of rock that contained opal in its natural state.  Neither Jim nor I had any idea what natural opal looked like.   We bought a piece to bring home with us.

 

 The lady was very informative, taking time to explain the whole process.  In a nut shell opal starts out as a liquid and ends up a solid when it hardens in the cracks and crevices of rock.  Another thing we learned is that not all opals in jewelry are solid stones. Many opals are what they call triplets. They take a thin layer of opal, back it with a thin layer of basalt, and then it is covered with a very thin layer of glass. I had no idea! I always thought of an opal along the same lines as any of the other precious stones, more like a solid piece of something, rather than a thin vein running through rock.

 

Our second day we spent looking for rocks in Dubois.  The lady at the opal place had told us that people had been finding sun stones inside pieces of pumas in the Dubois area.

 

We drove all over the Dubois area looking for pumas.  The only thing we ended up finding that was in any related to volcanoes was what looked like a lava tube that had collapsed.