(07/20/12) Driving

Lots of driving today. We woke up in Great Falls, Montana with plans of getting as far across the state as we could. We had two planned stops, one in Columbus, Montana and one in Billings, Montana. Both stops were the result of two issues of a magazine, Distinctly Montana, that I swiped from The Plains Hotel in Cheyanne, Wyoming last summer. Here is a link to the Yogos article and here is a link to the consignment article I liked.

Columbus Montana is home to the Montana Gem jewelry store. During the end of the 19^th century, there was a gold rush going on in the states and Montana saw its own share of prospectors hoping to strike it rich. The mining town of Yogo City was basically deserted by the 1880s and had turned out to be one of the least productive areas in the entire state for gold. Miners used sluice boards to separate the gold from the other pebbles and gravel. The sapphire pebbles would sink to the bottom of the gravel and clog up the sluice boards. Miners threw away these nuisance pebbles.

Enter Ed Collins, a gold prospector who discovered in 1865 that these little translucent pebbles were sapphires. He sent two packages to New York, one to Tiffany and Co. and the other to M. Fox and Co. Collins' pebbles came from a mine near the Missouri River and his stones were not consistent in color. They ranged from cornflower to royal blue and require heat treatment (which was not invented until the 1970s) to enhance their color. Because of the pale color palate, these sapphires were judged to be lesser in quality, giving Montana sapphires a bad reputation.

Enter Jake Hoover in 1895, another hopeful prospector. Like many who had gone before him, he noticed the little blue pebbles in the gravel beds while he was panning. But Jake Hoover was different from other prospectors gone by – he saved those blue pebbles. At the end of the mining season, he sent a box of the pebbles to New York to be evaluated by an expert. Dr. George F. Kunz (of Tiffany & Co.) evaluated the stones and identified them as rare sapphires or great quality. The royal blue color and quality of the stones has held up well when compared to those from Europe. Hoover was prospecting in a different location than Collins. Remember, it's always about location, location, location!

What makes the Yogo Sapphire so expensive is that the larger stones are not often found. George and I share a casual interest in mining, gemology and geology, so the process of the stones' formation and eventual recovery is neat to us.

I love thrift store shopping, but rarely have time to go. Friends and I would go to the thrift store in college, but usually only to get a couch for our dorm room. My sister got me seriously hooked. I had a ball this fall shopping for "Football Friday". We have a day where we dress up in NFL gear, watch game clips on the big screen at lunch and have a pep rally where we give stuff away to the kids. I went on a hunt to all three Frederick Goodwill locations with Dreda Kelley, a BES coworker, and we came away with the mother-load: shirts, sweatshirts and jerseys in all sizes from tons of teams!

My sister in Law, Amy, made my month when she told me what Atlee wanted for her birthday -- dress up clothes. I thought surely stuff from Toys 'R Us was where this was headed. Nope! To my delight, Amy suggested Goodwill. Oh my, Amy, you have no idea what you just did. You let the monster loose! Of course, I called my sister so she could keep her eyes peeled too. I cannot wait to get home so Atlee can open this box of found treasures!

We had three different Montana stores on our schedule including this one in Billings, The Bourne Again Shoppe, was the last one. Wouldn't you know it, but the first two were closed by the time we made it to their towns. One was on the day that I mis-navigated us and resulted in an extra two hours of driving. Today, by the time we got to Billings, the shop had been closed for twenty minutes. I KNEW we had spent too long at Montana Gem! Darn it!

We are in Miles City, Montana now, getting ready for bed -- off to dreamland.