While experienced hunters fully enjoy a good day of garnet hunting, you do not have to be an experienced hunter to find these dazzling little gems. In fact, they are probably the best stone for inexperienced bricklayers to start a hunt. These adorable gems are quite common in many US states and countries around the world. The rock that carries the pomegranate is often filled with stones, so once you find a good pomegranate storage area, you can easily take along a very healthy cache.
Pomegranates come in different varieties, and the type of rocks in your chosen area will determine the type of pomegranate you will collect. The most desirable crystals will be red wines of red, purple, pink or brilliant green. Even smaller crystals are completely different in their natural form, and you can recognize them when you see them.
Your first step in garnet hunting, as with all gems, is to check your maps and guides. When it comes to garnets, I never worry about the fact that the place is “chosen”, because the stones are usually so numerous in any garnet area. Then you want to make sure that you pack all the equipment you need to collect the stones.
You will want to pick your rock pick and hammer and a small screwdriver (1/8 inch is good) or a chisel for any stones that you find in the matrix rocks. I use them a little in the places of the grenade, because every once in a while I see a stone, still embedded in a matrix stone, which I simply cannot miss. Many times the stone carrying the grenade is soft, and the stones can be easily removed with a small flat screwdriver or a knife blade. A hammer can be used to break rocks to find stones. However, this is actually a difficult way to get grenades, and I usually don’t resort to worrying about the stone itself. The tools I use most often when hunting for this particular type of gem are the spaghetti colander, the screen and the army problem bending the spade.
Over time, grenades are eroded from the matrix rock. By scooping up dirt in a rock-bearing area and sifting it in a colander, you can easily find gems. I use a colander to hunt for a gem stone, because the holes are the right size so that the stones are smaller than I am interested in failing. If you want to spend money on a hardware store for special screens, they have grids of various sizes that will allow you to choose how large the gems are for capturing them on the screen. If the area seems to have been picked up, then by digging deeper, you can usually find stones that fell and were covered before the area became popular for hunters.
After “panning” a mountain area, I also like to pan nearby streams for gems. Grenades washed
downstream from their source over time and not as heavy as some other minerals, so you don’t need to dig too deep to find good quality stones. However, water flows can destroy the natural edges of the stone, so you may find that many of the crystals in the water are much smoother than those that are in the real zone of rocks, depending on how long they have been there. When I select a spot in the stream, I use the colander again to check the quality and size of the stones.
I use a screen of normal size for concentrated gems in streams, where the riverbed is literally pinkish with small grenades. You will see this in many areas of the pomegranate. Most of these small garnets are not the size or quality of gems, but they make large ship stocks. I scoop these on the screen and just put it in the bucket. Later at home, I separate the small stones from the rest of the sand while watching TV or talking on the phone.
Once you find some good gems for use in jewelry, you will want to read the gold panorama so that you can find a nugget that one of your new gems will look beautiful with a ring or pendant.
