stake your own claim gem mining

Turquoise part of gem mining history

Centuries before Monty Nichols came along, turquoise was being mined on the slopes of Sleeping Beauty Mountain.

The Salado and other ancient peoples mined the beautiful blue stone here and from several other local surface outcroppings, including Pinto Valley.

By Bob Zache  Friday, January 19, 2007 found at silverbelt.com

It is believed some Spanish explorers made it up a few of the Salt River tributaries, including Pinal Creek and Pinto Valley. Bill Boheme, an old time local rancher and mining claim owner, told of finding a Spanish lance point while riding his range one day. So it's possible that the Spanish carried off some turquoise before other Europeans arrived in the late 1860s. By the 1870s small underground mines pock-marked the hills surrounding Globe.

stake your own claim gem mining

As late as the 1930's there were the remains of a little mine town where Copper Cities Mine open pit benches are now. Named Louis De Ore (or maybe Louis d'Ouere), most of the old buildings were torn down and hauled away during the Great Depression, used for building material by out-of-work miners.

Cities Service Company started the Copper Cities Mine (commonly called the Sleeping Beauty Mine) there about 1952 and it operated until Pinto Valley mine opened in 1972. During that period, L.W. Hardy had the contract to mine turquoise, both at Sleeping Beauty and at Castle Dome, later the Pinto Valley Mine. Formerly a meat cutter at a market in Miami, Hardy recognized early on that turquoise was more valuable as a gem stone than for it's copper content.

This was before turquoise jewelry became immensely popular starting in the 1960s. By the time the turquoise boom began, Hardy had contracts with mining companies in Miami, Kingman and elsewhere. He also developed a method for stabilizing low-grade porous turquoise with pressure -impregnated hot acrylic resin, hardening and improving the color for use in jewelry.

Hardy's mining methods were pretty primitive, compared with current operations. Workers would sit out in a ditch ripped by a bulldozer and hand pick the stone from the waste-rock. He mined turquoise at Sleeping Beauty for 22 years, getting about 45 percent recovery and leaving the rest in waste dumps.

Monty Nichols got the contract to mine in 1988 and began using modern mining methods to develop the property. He drills and blasts the overburden, hauling it to the abandoned Copper Cities pit now containing the recycled tailings from Miami Copper Company's old No. 5 tailing dam that dominated the eastern skyline of downtown Miami until a few of years ago.

In 1998, Nichols started the two-year project to remove five million tons of overburden. Located half way up the side of an open pit mine, the narrow turquoise-bearing zone has about 400 feet of hard waste rock on top of it. In order to move sideways into the orebody, a whole slice of the mountain had to be removed.

As he removes the overburden, Nichols is careful not to blast too near the turquoise-bearing strata below; he doesn't want to fracture any of the valuable blue gemstone. That layer is more friable -- crumbly -- so his miners can rip it and dump it over screens, separating the material by rock size. No crushers are used, again to avoid fracturing the gemstone, and the different sized rock is hauled up to a wide mine bench where conveyor belts move the material through three buildings. There workers hand pick the turquoise from the broken rock. The buildings are vented with filtered air to eliminate workers' exposure to dust, and well insulated to keep them comfortable in any weather. It's a far cry from the old methods of mining, Nichols points out. Anywhere from 30 to 40 people work at the mine, Nichols said, depending on how much mining they have to do.

Fifty years ago, mine workers filled lunch buckets with the colorful rock, even though it was a firing offense. And old habits die hard, Nichols lamented; some people still think it's okay to sneak in and try to pick turquoise. As a result, security is tight in and around the mine. Motion detectors, night vision cameras and 24-7 roving patrols are very effective, he said, so the only turquoise leaving the property now is being shipped to markets around the world.

Italy is their best customer, though Germany and Hong Kong also buy a lot, Nichols said. And they buy the best grade for the high-dollar jewelry made there. Jewelry makers in India and Spain also receive Sleeping Beauty turquoise, while in the U.S., Gallup and Albuquerque buy the most.

Worn by pharoahs and Aztec kings, turquoise is believed to be one of the oldest gemstones. Its name may come from “Turquie,” French for Turkey, where it was believed the gem was mined, though ancient miners actually dug it in Iran and Egypt, two of the world's oldest known turquoise mining areas. For thousands of years, the finest intensely blue turquoise came from Persia (Iran), though it is believed those deposits have been mined out.

The best of Monty Nichols' Sleeping Beauty turquoise is comparably beautiful and, he believes, much of his gemstone is being hauled overseas and smuggled into, then out of, Iran and sold as “Persian” turquoise.

But that's okay, he's happy to sell it to them, he says. And he plans to be mining at Sleeping Beauty for many years to come. First mined by humans almost 1,000 years ago, it has a long mine life.

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