Glitter Mountain

addiemjones
Aug 28, 2017
3 min read

Hey guys!

Quick question: Do you have a favorite stone/gem/crystal?

Last weekend I was looking for something really fun to do in Southern Utah, so I hopped online and began my search. Soon, I stumbled across an article about a place called Glitter Mountain.

GLITTER MOUNTAIN!

The article said it was an old abandoned gypsum mine in the middle of nowhere, and if you could find it, you could take anything you wanted!

I obviously had to check it out, so I packed up my car, grabbed some friends and headed out into the Arizonian Desert. We followed the directions through plateaus, valleys, and rocky roads until we saw a glint in the distance.

If we hadn't come at just the right time when the sun was at an angle, I think we could have driven right past it! It isn't much to look at from a distance, but the real magic happened when you got up close and really started to look.

As soon as I stepped out of the car and looked at the dirt I could tell there was something special about this place! There were tiny fragments of crystals everywhere! They slowly got bigger as you got closer and closer to the mine itself.

The actual mine was a large pit dug into the ground with red rock at the top that led into the gypsum crystals at the base of the walls. We went in the evening around 5 pm and it was hot!

111 degrees hot.

Luckily we brought a lot of water, but it was still exhausting.

My cute roommates (pictured left to right) Hailey, Sammy, and Myriah.

We brought along a couple of screwdrivers to pick at the wall. These did absolutely nothing without a hammer, so we decided to try to hit it with a rock.

Lol.

We could only pull off little pieces that were fragile and would break very easily. It was kind of discouraging. Some of us were getting hungry, and we didn't pack any food, so they chose to go back because of the heat and for dinner.

The rest of us stayed and sifted through the piles of previously excavated crystals.

We were determined to find something!

The small clear stones mixed in with the red sandstone was really pretty! The different textures and colors of the two rocks was really fascinating to us!

We couldn't find any large chunks of crystals, especially compared to pictures we had seen before.

We were getting tried.

Looking at the ground, we could see half buried crystals and they seemed just as small as the others.

But when we brushed them off and dug around them a little, we discovered huge softball sized pieces that needed all three of us to pull out of the ground!

They were bigger than we could get our hands around and they would break off from each other because of their layering. But they were still larger than any of the ones we found on the surface!

We dug for another hour, going deeper and deeper, pulling out more and more huge stones! Our knuckles and fingertips hurt from the hard rock, but we were having so much fun! We loaded up the back of my car with the biggest ones we found and we brought them home to clean off!

We looked like a trio of real life geologists!

Much to the dismay of our roommate Sammy, (who had cleaned the bathroom last) we stacked all the stones on the counter and cleaned them off in our sinks.

The sand, from both our clothes and the crystals, got everywhere. We made sure to clean everything up when we were done.

After we cleaned them all off and dried them, we discovered how beautiful they really were!

The formations of the fragments were so unique to each stone. Some had a green hue and some were hazy white, but most of them were clear with a peach undertone.

Peach.

It's so in.

We are still trying to decide what to do with them, but we think they would look amazing in jewelry or a glass jar with fairy lights!

What do you think we should do with them? Tell me in the comments!