Blue Bounty

Californian beauty benitoite got a little less rare this spring.

By Kate Woods

A boulder near the location of the original benioite vein before it was split by miners' dynamite in the early 1900s. Photo by Aeon Schmoock.

The famous Benitoite Gem Mine - home to the official California state gemstone - was sold for an undisclosed sum last November after 35 years in the careful hands of two Fresno miners.

In a scenario that has been fantasized by every miner since 1849, the new owner struck pay dirt in April this year, during his first week on the job. Acting on a gut feeling and his extensive knowledge of geology, Bryan Lees dug in an area that already had been explored by former owners Buzz Gray and Bill Forrest, who had thought the vein was depleted. Within hours, Lees hit upon a long-hidden shelf of blue schist, the matrix that blankets benitoite crystals. He knew it was the mother lode, or at least a bigger vein of the gem than anyone imagined still existed.

"Buzz and Bill didn't get everything," said the exuberant new landlord, geologist Bryan Lees. A long-time expert on minerals, especially benitoite, Lees has been a good friend to Gray and Forrest for 15 years. Lees' association with the two miners has played a major role in his present love affair with the gem, an affliction that benitoite fanatics refer to as "benitoite fever."

Ironically, it was Bill Forrest who was operating the backhoe that opened the hole where the benitoite vein was rediscovered. Forrest wanted to help Lees out during the transition of ownership."They thought they had gone through it all," Lees said.

What makes mining benitoite so perplexing is that unlike gold, in which veins generally run in one direction, benitoite veins are twisted and erratic. To put together a resource map of the mine, said Lees, would be futile. "You can go 20 feet and it vaults off.”

He didn't buy the mine thinking there was anything left of the old vein. His plan was to rework the old cobble piles and settling ponds in a quest for smaller, more affordable benitoite stones. Lees still plans to do that, because he believes there's a market for affordable benitoite. The surprise discovery, however, has pushed back the timetable.

When asked a week before he flew to California to work his new mine whether he was hoping for a big find, Lees was realistic.

"It's the $64,000 question, if the mine is played out or not," he said from his rock and gem shop in Golden, Colorado. "No one really knows."

Benitoite, found only in this one place in the world, is among the rarest gems on the planet. A production of 1,000 carat per year is a big haul, and most of the gems found are less than one carat. A one-carat, eye-clean benitoite gemstone, about the size of a pea, sells for $1,600 today.

A 1.06-ct. benitoite pendant with diamonds. Photo courtesy William Scott Forrest/wsfgems.com.

Benitoite is not a super-hard gemstone - it's 6.5 on the Mohs scale of hardness - but it has a higher refractive index than diamond. That brilliance, its royal blue color, and its rarity are what draw benitoite lovers to the stone and what lured Lees from Colorado.

The mining operation could be mistaken for a bizarre public works project if it weren't in a remote area that probably never will be served by utilities. A backhoe and front-end loader perform the bulk of the work, and the valuable ore is sifted out in an almost comically complicated apparatus that includes an old turkey feeder.

The loader dumps a yard or more of dark dirt and blue schist rock, the flaky kind that splits easily, as well as the hard crossite ore into the feeder. There, the rocks tumble aside and the promising stones and rock specimens wash through a screen to the jig below. The jig sifts and separates the precious stones from the common ones. Below the equipment are two large settling ponds, where water is recycled back up the hill to start the process all over again.

One recent day when worked turned off the rock-shaking equipment for the noon break, the silence almost hurt the ears. Only a falcon quietly pumping his wings could be heard overhead. Lees stood above the 30-foot pit where he rediscovered the main vein and looked west, toward the serpentine Diablo Mountain Range. Outcropping blobs of volcanic basalt formed huge, hard pillows on scattered peaks.

Hiking up toward the third level of the three-tiered mountain, where the original vein was found in 1907, Lees explained how benitoite, found only in this one place in the world, was formed hundreds of thousands of years ago. At that time San Benito County was under the ocean, and silt containing titanium barium silicate pushed through the fault lines, creating this rare gem.

Mining only happens for eight weeks a year, March through April, when the headwaters of the San Benito River are strong enough to provide water to pump into the screening equipment.

The short mining season means Lees works with a sense of urgency. One of three assistants drives a front-end loader with dirt and rock from the deep hole where the vein was found, while another pulls big rocks and prospective "keepers" from the mechanical jig below the hopper.

Regardless of Lee's rediscovery of the Level 2 main vein, he still plans to go ahead with his resifting plans on the ponds and cobble piles. But the discovery sweetens the gem mine's price tag, speculated to be a cool $1 million, since it was on the market last year for $1.5 million.

A Miner’s Holy Grail
Benitoite was first discovered - or at least recognized by the conventional mineral community - in 1907, when a cinnabar prospector named James Couch literally stumbled upon what he thought was a miraculous cache of blue diamonds. Equipped with his donkey and pick-axe, Couch had been trolling the serpentine mountains of southern San Benito for two days when he spotted a promising outcrop of rocks. He pulled back some brush to uncover the entrance of two narrow clefts of rock, and just about fainted when he stepped into what seemed like a giant geode.

Before his feet lay thousands of dazzling, cobalt-blue crystals, and thousands more were embedded in the glittering snow-white natrolite walls of the cave.

Historians and benitoite buffs have often wondered if the local Indians knew about the benitoite spot. No benitoite-adorned artifacts have ever surfaced, so some theorize that the Native Americans considered the gem locale a sacred area, and proclaimed it so off-limits that only the most revered shamans were allowed to be near it.

A Berkeley geologist deduced the original vein was associated with a rock mass 520 feet long and 400 feet wide, according to a report he wrote in 1909. Inevitably, the industrial miners of the turn of the century got ahold of it.

Benitoite is found in a matrix of three other minerals: a hard blue schist, a cement-like rock called crossite, and white natrolite. The blue schist and cement-hard crossite frustrated the impatient benitoite miners, who tired of forever pickaxing the matrix away from the crystals. In an effort to easily remove the gems, they dynamited the main vein, obliterating the phenomenal human-sized geode that Couch had stepped into. Old tin-type photos of the first mining operations show rough-looking miners actually using a punch-press on boulders, crushing the rocks and crystals within to splintered shards.

According to accounts from the Couch family, only one in a hundred gem crystals survived this torture unbroken. The rest became pulverized blue dust that literally blew away with the wind through the Diablo Mountains, melding with the asbestos fibers born of the serpentine schist kicked up every weekend behind the back tires of dirt bikes and off-road vehicles.

It was later the miners learned that muratic acid eats away the natrolite/crossite/schist matrix and exposes the benitoite while keeping it intact, and the method is still used to this day. Mere mention of the crude method of benitoite extraction practiced back in the beginning years of the gem's discovery is enough to make a benitoite collector cry.

Shortly after Couch’s discovery, a sample of benitoite was sent to Professor George Louderback, a geologist from Berkeley. Louderback was astounded to behold what he correctly determined to be a brand new gem mineral, one whose geometrical crystal formation had already been predicted by mineralogists in 1869. Though it had yet to be found, scientists knew that the dipyramidical trigon shape had to exist in the mineral world, and they reserved a category for it, called Class 28.

Yet another trademark of benitoite is the fact that it fluoresces. Under the purple-black light of an ultraviolet short-wave lamp, the gemstones glows bright neon blue. Miners who have placer claims downstream from the main mining locale use UV short wave in the middle of the night to find the few bits that have made their way down the river. This method can be perilous because a special species of scorpion resides in the area, one that fluoresces almost the same eerie blue as benitoite under the UV lamps. Many a hard-working and perhaps overzealous placer miner has been stung by the little devils.

Before embarking on his journey to find cinnabar that February in 1907, Couch was grub-staked by oil man Roderick W. Dallas. There are many different versions of what happened after the discovery. Descendants of Couch, 94 years later, believe their ancestor was bilked out of his share of the mine by Dallas, who laid claim to the site until 1914. Dallas abandoned it at that point, thinking the main vein had been "pinched out."

He was wrong.

AZCO's Folly
The mine's history from the time Dallas deserted it to the point when Bill Forest and Buzz Gray took it over is something of a mystery. The mine remained for the most part inactive for the first

The process of sorting through dirt in search of benitoite at the mine. Photo by Aeon Schmoock.

half of the century after its initial discovery. Then, starting in the late 1950s, rockhounds began visiting the site and toting out museum-quality specimens. Many of those fabulous display specimens have now found their way into museums and university collections.

In 1997, Forrest and Gray leased the Benitoite Gem Mine to AZCO, a mining outfit that runs gold and copper interests around the world. The deal was that AZCO would lease it for one year, for $20,000. Any recovered material would be set aside and still remain the property of Forrest and Gray unless AZCO decided to pick up the option to outright buy the patented claim for $1.5 million. As part of the deal, Forrest and Gray acted as consultants.

AZCO went to work, found little, then extended the lease for another two years. In desperation, during the third year, the company core drilled down 100 feet in half a dozen different spots around the vicinity of the original gem artery on Level 1 - all for naught. Not one of the core drillings even suggested a hint of a missed benitoite vein, so, after three years and $60,000, AZCO gave up.

They thought they had answered that $64,000 question.

Like Forrest and Gray, the new benitoite mine owner has a nose for his favorite gem. Bryan Lees knew exactly where the original benitoite vein was on the claim. He also knew that a 100-foot part of it broke off during the Earth's early tumultuous history, fell down the mountain from Level 1 to Level 2, and got buried under 30 feet of dirt and rock over thousands of years.

Lees is the proprietor of a company called The Collector's Edge, which retails rare mineral display specimens and gemstones in Golden, Colorado. He and his wife, Kathryn, also own a rhodochrosite mine near Brackenridge, Colorado. The red, rare gemstone is one that, like benitoite, attracts loyal fans who consider their preferred gem of desire second to none.

Lees plans eventually to turn the Benitoite Gem Mine into a collection park for rockhounds to scour, but only after he mines his fill of nature's blue sparkling wonder. That could be, he says, in about six years.

As Lees picked up a piece of gemmy blue rock taken from the "keeper" bucket near the jig, he beamed the way a new father might.

"It really is the best gem on earth," he said.