This article was originally published by The-Vug.com in January, 2016.
The-Vug.com brings you this article about the Coyote Front Range Garnet Location with Cal Graeber.
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Collecting Coyote Range Garnets w/ Cal Graeber
Fine Garnet Specimens from Bishop Califorina
At the spring 2007 Costa Mesa Show we found ourselves chatting with Kerith Graeber about our upcoming filming in Inyo County when she remarked that Cal was going to be digging Garnets up in Bishop around that time too and perhaps we could go with him to film. As you can imagine I didn’t want to miss filming this for our Inyo County collecting video, so I made plans to meet up next weekend and go to the elusive Coyote Front Range Garnet Location!
I still have yet to see a California field guide with this location listed and even the thick Minerals of California Bulletin 189 only makes this reference to the location…”Crystals of brown grossular showing the unusual form have been collected near Bishop.” As it turns out, Grossular, Epidote, Idocrase, Calcite and Scheelite can be found all around the mountains due west on Warm Springs Canyon Road, 5 miles south of Bishop. So, after meeting our guides Cal Graeber and Jeff Kent in Bishop we headed off to one of there favorite Garnet collecting areas.
Many of the specimens I had seen in collections or for sale have always been internally cracked so I was surprised to see the beautiful glossy clear gem grossular garnets that Cal and Jeff had collected the day before!
The deposit is a Skarn, a mixture of Epidote, Garnet and Calcite, and quite tough material to get out of the ground! The gemmy garnets are found in “pods” of Calcite, since the Calcite can be melted off with a weak acid, the Garnets found in the Calcite are often of the best quality. The deposit seems to have layers of Epidote, Garnet, Calcite, Garnet, Epidote. The Epidote is so hard that it seems to be nearly impossible to get through with heavy tools. Once you hit the Epidote zone you get ready to give your blisters a workout!
Since the material is so hard to remove from the ground people usually have to hammer and hammer to get material out and the pressure from the hammering causes the garnets to crack internally, which explains why all the specimens I had seen were so fractured on the inside. Well, smart guys that Cal and Jeff are, they had a fun solution to this problem.
First Step, drill some holes
Second Step, Insert Patented Rock Removal System
Third Step, Collect Garnets
The plates of Garnets are still quite a bit of work to get out of the rock once it is loosened up, requiring dozens and dozens of blows with the sledge hammer and several bouts wrestling Epidote boulders out of the way with this monster “Slide Hammer”
The specimens found that day were quite fine and I was surprised to see how little material we had moved over those few hours.
There was still tons of beautiful garnets left in the Calcite pods.
So, now when you see a specimen from the Coyote Range, Bishop, California, you can see just how much work goes into producing that fat glossy gem cluster!
