Imagine Bed & Breakfast at a mountaintop crystal mine... with the miners exposing fresh vugs every day, just for your collecting pleasure! That's our Ultimate Adventure.
Your small group (2 to 5 people, adults only), will spend 3 days at Spruce and 3 days at Rock Candy. We'll drive between the localities in our comfy air-conditioned van, with stops at other crystal and fossil locales along the way. Depending on your interests, we can include wildlife photography, hotsprings, or Native American heritage side trips.
Price depends upon number of participants:
2 people: $3100/each; 3 people: $2600 each; 4 or 5 people; $2200 each. Price is all inclusive: we provide all tools, collecting access, guides, transportation, most meals, tents, all accomodations (motel, B&B, tent), packing & shipping your specimens home. We'll pick you up and drop you off at SeaTac airport (Seattle) or Kelowna, BC. Round up a few friends and enjoy the collecting experience of a lifetime!
Sample itinerary:
Day 1: Morning pick up at Sea-Tac (Seattle) airport. Drive 2 hours to opalized wood collecting. Relax and swim that evening at a lakeside lodge.
Day 2: Explore amazing dry waterfalls of the Columbia Plateau, collect abundant fossil plants (insects & fish if you're lucky!), stay at Canadian B&B.
Day 3: Arrive Rock Candy Mine. Learn the geology which produced abundant vugs here, then collect newly exposed fluorite/barite/quartz vugs. Camp in our creekside meadow, or stay 40 minutes away in a heritage house B&B.
Day 4 & 5: Collect 4 mineralized zones of Rock Candy, as the miners expose new vugs for you. Depending on the time of year, photograph spectacular wildflowers or feast on abundant wild berries. Camp at Rock Candy Mountain or return to your B&B..
Day 6: Return to Washington, with stops to collect rhodonite, garnet, or chalcopyrite. Great chances of wildlife viewing along this route! B&B accomodations in antique railway cars.
Day 7 & 8: Collect superb quartz (scepters, inclusions) and pyrite at Spruce. We will expose fresh rock each day to find new vugs. Enjoy the spectacular view from your tentsite, carefully carved into our mountainside amongst 500 year old cedars. Let the sound of Nellie Falls, a 100 meter waterfall, lull you to sleep.
Day 9: After morning collecting, soak off the pyrite dust in a wilderness hotspring. A short drive returns us to Seattle, where we'll professionally wrap your specimens and drop you at SeaTac.
Dates available:
For 2007, pick any 9 days between June 15 and September 30. Trip is available to groups of 2 to 5 people.
