Xavier
Looking for sapphires is allot like diamonds, they come from deep in the earth and come up in volcanic material, there is a site a couple hours from here called the yogo mine, they mine yogo sapphires which are the most valuable and rarest in the world. Those are dug out of dikes, I think that most of the sapphires here come from dikes or old volcanic flows.
They have a hardness scale of 9 one under a diamond. If you find one you will know it, the main thing is they are translucent when held up to light, have different colors than other rocks and have a different shape than the river rocks you would find them with.
Where I look for them is on old river beds just on top of bed rock, this material was deposited millions of years ago along with gold. They are heavy like gold so they settle in the same places, some times if you are sluicing for gold they end up in the ripple of the sluice. I also look for hematite which is a very heavy rock, usually sapphire will be with them.
There are a 3-4 different areas around here to look for sapphires and all of them have different types and sizes of stone and colors.
A couple of my best sites are old mines by a large river that have been dug out to bedrock, the old miner were not looking for sapphires but gold so the sapphires were thrown into the tailing piles with all of the other rocks. I use a 3/4 screen and screen off the lager rocks, then use a very small screen with material in a trough of water, you then rock the screen back and fourth many times while its in the water, then flip the screen over on the ground or table and the sapphires and hematite will be right on top (if you did it right). Sapphires are heavier that normal rocks in water so they sink to the bottom, the water also washes the dirt off and makes them shine more than normal rocks.
I also have a gas powered sapphire jig that will go through a yard of material in about hour ( it does most of the hard work in a very short time ).
I use that here at home and will bring material from the field in 5 gal buckets, I would use the jig in the field but its heavy, bulky and needs allot of water for it to work right.
Keith
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