Gem Mountain Sapphire Mine — Local services in Philipsburg

I will never visit nor recommend anyone ever visiting Gem Mountain again. Something my family has been doing for over a decade every summer!!!

We were treated like absolute garbage during our visit on 08/22/20. I get some of it was COVID related. We live out of state now and had no clue reservations were going to be required. That being said, the lady at the front desk (after waiting an hour in line) treated us as tho we were some sort of trespassers since we did not have a reservation. We traveled all the way from WI with our 1 month old daughter. We brought my 84 y/o grandmother to help pick through stones as she enjoys the rush of finding the [big ones]. As we all do...

Woman told us very rudely that we needed to leave because they were already over capacity and that if the health inspectors showed up they would be shut down. I very upset, said "I'll be sure to give them a call once we reach service then!"

All the above is besides the point... I get it, there are specific guidelines each business needs to follow in todays times. That's easy enough to let go of. It was our bad for not knowing we would need reservations. (Maybe advertise that reservations will be needed or post signs so people are aware.) We weren't.

What really ERKS me is we always went up, recieved a 5 gallon bucket for $15.00. (I believe last year it may have been $20.00) but still a 5 gallon bucket. This year I was almost satisfied that we couldn't do it because they are now charging $35.00 for a bucket HALF the size. Talk about price gouging and SCAMMING people out of their hard earned money. Not to mention those from out of state don't realize that all this gravel has already been gone through. You will never find a big one, (clear enough to do anything with) unless it was placed back in there simply so they can keep up appearances of them randomly showing up. How can you honestly think this is ok???

So many families are looking for outdoor activities to do with their family, you, knowing you're one of them, quite literally rob them blind. You should be ashamed of yourselves! I will never send anyone there ever again.

For families looking for a true rush, and not to be robbed blind, when searching for mines, look for ones that you get to dig the gravel from the earth yourself. There are many near the...

My mother and I enjoyed our time at the Gem Mountain Sapphire Mine. When we arrived it was a nice sunny day, we bought 2 buckets. I feel the $40 each was a little expensive, however I feel the experience made up for it for sure. All staff we encountered were extremely helpful, kind and encouraging. Even though I was shown how to do the water panning/sifting, I completely failed at this, however as the day went on and it looked like a thunderstorm was rolling in a very kind staff member came and offered to help us with the water panning of the rest of our buckets. This was extremely helpful and greatly sped things up. My mom did struggle to find some sapphires even with her readers, but that is more user error than the fault of the mine. The sapphires were small, but I was not expecting to find large sapphires. The biggest sapphire we found was about the size of a pencil eraser, and I even found a pink sapphire! Between my mom and I we found over 30 cts of sapphires. I did do the gem consultation with Brian, and decided to have 1 of my 4 cuttable gems sent off to be heat treated and faceted. I am excited to see the results, however he said it may take 9-12 months to receive the gem back. He did take down all my information and provided me with contact information/receipt so I can check on the progress of my stone. I cant wait to see the results and come back to Gem...

I ordered some sapphire gravel about a month ago,although I found a bunch of multicolored sapphire I was kind of disappointed with the size of them.The biggest ones were around half a caret or so,I was hoping on something a little bigger,at least one between 3 to 5 carets or so.Don't get me wrong though, these were all beautiful stones and maybe there are bigger ones to be found,but definitely not in the batch that I purchased. I've been mining stones in NC for a long time and I took my time and sifted through every inch of my sapphire gravel and didn't find any sizable ones,but size doesn't matter vs quality when it comes to sapphire and I guess it's like finding a unicorn to get both at the same time.I would suggest using a screen to condense the dirt down and using a gold pan to find the sapphire,I use 1/4 screen in my mining boxes and nothing was bigger than that,so it fell through into the gold pan.They are relatively easy to spot once the dirt is rinsed away ,but you have to wash them thoroughly. I would like to give it another try, and maybe I'll find that unicorn that I was talking about.It was a fun experience, but something tells me that the box was seeded,but I guess that's cool if you want...