Day Two – Monday September 13: Helena and the Spokane Bar Sapphire Mine

They call Montana Big Sky Country, but it’s also known as the Treasure State, and on Monday we were going to see if Montana would live up to its name and share a little treasure with us.  Seems my wife, Irina, got this idea several months earlier that it would be fun to dig for our own gems.  She heard about this place near Helena where anyone could come and either dig your own stuff or buy one of their bags of pre-sorted material.  So we researched it on the internet, talked to the owner on the phone, and made it the first destination on our trip.

I was glad we wouldn’t be driving much that day anyway, as I had a lousy night’s sleep in Missoula, for no particular reason that I could discern. By 8:15 we were on the freeway. I kept hearing Willie Nelson in my head every morning on this trip – “I’m on the road again” – and I don’t even like Willie Nelson. We left I-90 at Garrison and headed due east to Helena on U.S. Highway 12, another beautiful mountain drive.

(Along Highway 12 east of Helena)

(Along Highway 12 east of Helena)

Helena is by no means a big city, but it proved a little more complicated than I expected finding my way through town and eight miles out to the “mine” mostly due to  the cursory nature of the directions I’d been given. The quotation marks around “mine” are only there because when we eventually found the Spokane Bar Sapphire Mine near the shores of Lake Hauser, it didn’t fit any conventional picture or mental image I had of what a gem mine might look like. It basically consisted of a ramshackle wooden building, some picnic tables set up to use for picking through your gravel, water troughs, a couple of porta-potties, two wandering hounds, and off in the near distance a backhoe. All in all a much smaller operation than I’d envisioned.

(Spokane Bar Sapphire Mine near Helena, Montana)

Inside the building there is a jewelers case with polished and cut sapphires, quartz, emeralds, and garnets for sale. Rattlesnake skins are mounted conspicuously on the wall behind the counter.

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Day One – Getaway Day, Sunday September 12

It seemed fitting that our leave-taking of western Washington should be accompanied by overcast skies and drizzle.  We headed east on I-90 and hit Snoqualmie Pass about an hour after leaving the house and stopped for the first of 2,197 potty breaks. No really, I kept count.  See, I have this theory about women, pregnancy, and the long-term effects of said pregnancy on their internal organs, specifically the bladder. Like many things in life, as a man I can understand this intellectually, but in practice, well, sometimes it can be just a teensy bit annoying. I’m sure if I’d carried something the size of a pumpkin around inside me and had it squashing all my organs for nine months, I would probably have some issues with bladder control for the rest of my life, too. Plus, my wife likes to drink tea.  But I digress.

(I-90 bridge crossing the Columbia River near Vantage, Wash)

The temperature at the pass read fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit, but half an hour later when we stopped to stretch our legs after crossing the Columbia River near Vantage it was well into the seventies.  We wouldn’t see the mercury drop lower than that during the daytime for the next nineteen days, the entire duration of the trip.  In fact, the seventies would have seemed positively frigid most of that time.

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About The Author

My name is Greg Prohl, and I live in Kent, Washington.  I’ve had a love for writing and photography since my teenage years, and although my love for travel came later in life, this site is the natural result of combining three passions.

When I was young I liked the idea of traveling to distant places, but it rarely happened and remained more a dream than a reality. Now, whenever time and budget allows, my wife and I do our best to take full advantage of both domestic and international travel opportunities.

I have been in twenty-four of the fifty states and hope to hit them all some day. I have also been to Canada, France, and Ukraine, and along with my wife, our sights are set squarely on many more targets around the globe.

My aim here is to simply give my readers some taste of the joys and the challenges, the ups and downs, I have experienced on my journeys, impart a smile or two along the way, and hopefully inspire you to “get out of town.”

Happy trails!

If you have any comments or questions, please contact me at info@prohltravel.com or gjexcalibur@msn.com