Emerald Creek Garnet Parking Area — Attraction in Idaho

apparently I have another review of this place on here somewhere. go read it it will tell you how to do what you need to do. It was a half a mile from the parking lot up to the garnet digging place. It was all uphill. By the time we got there we were pretty tired from the hike. you pay $10 per person and you get two buckets. Dig in the dirt Hill, go over to the sifting area, sift the dirt out, put all the rocks in the bucket is empty, take it down to the trough, and wash wash wash wash the rocks and see if you have any garnets. It's back-breaking. It was not Sunny the day we were there, or we would have had a burn worse than we did. Bring a wagon with wheels. Put your dirt in it, and wheel it over to the sifting pit. That way you won't break your back hauling buckets of dirt. Most of which is wet. Build yourself a sifter that stands about 30 in tall. And sift the dirt. Two people had sifters that they built. One let me use it. What a difference! bring some type of gloves. Rubber would be best, it will save your fingernails, and your skin. Because your hands are in the water all the time and the oil everything gets completely sucked out of your skin.

Your hands are red rough and generally hurt. I figured out to use a larger rock as a scoop, to push the other rocks aside. It worked until my fingers cramped up.

And then what do you do with the garnets you find? If you are not a faceter there's not...

Love coming here and hunting for garnets. Rangers are friendly, price is only $10 for up to 5lbs of garnet (very unlikely you'll get more than 2 lbs in a day though). Bring sunscreen, plenty of water, and food - there's a bit of a hike from the parking area up to where you dig for garnets. If you have a handicapped placard you can call ahead, they'll let you park right by the digging area and avoid the walk. The only facilities here are port a potties, one in the parking lot and one by the dig site. You will get hot and FILTHY while searching for garnets, but you'll find at least chips of garnet in pretty much every bucket load. I have a tip for finding star garnets from the jeweler I took my find to. If you hold the garnet up to a strong light source (say, the flashlight on your cell phone) and light shines through the whole stone, its not a star garnet. If light only shines through the outer edges of the stone, it could have a star. The stars are produced by inclusions in the garnet that also happen to make it more opaque. (See photos. Top garnet has very little light shining through, could have a star; bottom one is much more translucent and likely won't have a star.) Just talking about it makes me want to go back and...

From S. Spokane it's about a two-hour drive. This is a super fun experience for all ages and people with disabilities. Go early, we arrived about 9:15 and by 11 there were a good amount of people but not too many. We sleuthed for 4 hours and were able to collect 5 oz of garnets and a whole lot of really cool rocks including cookies, garnet encrusted rocks. I will go back and I highly recommend this experience, it's close and it's cheap. I recommend you take a sun hat, gloves, zip locks, sunscreen, t-shirt, lunch and a lot of water. The Rangers there are very nice and very helpful. While driving down the dirt acess road we saw the sheriff coming up to check on things and I thought that's cool it's safe up here. On our way back we stopped and jumped in the St. Joe River to cool off. What a...