In late August, I lived out a prospecting fantasy I didn’t even know I had when I joined a group of retailers from around the country on a three-day visit to the Rock Creek sapphire mine located about 23 miles southwest of the tiny town of Philipsburg, Mont. (population: 910).
As guests of Parlé—the Pocatello, Idaho–based jewelry manufacturer, whose husband-and-wife co-owners, Jonathan and Brecken Farnsworth, have worked with Potentate Mining, the Canadian firm that owns the sapphire mine, since 2018—we had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go straight to the source.
The Farnsworths had organized retailer gem buying trips to Thailand in the past and knew that taking their best clients to the origin was a sure way to stoke their enthusiasm for colored stones.
“We’ve found that when we can tell the story of a gemstone or the journey of the gemstone from where it comes from, through all the hands it touches, that it gives our retailers another tool to use,” Brecken told me during a break in the itinerary last August, when we regrouped at our temporary digs, the Broadway Hotel in Philipsburg.
The group of 16 (all women!) that Parlé invited included a range of retailers: Danielle Miele, aka Gem Gossip, an influencer and online retailer in Nashville; Nikki Swift, a personal jeweler in San Antonio, Texas; and Josephs, a Rolex authorized dealer in Des Moines, Iowa, to name a few.
Jonathan said he hoped the group would take away from the experience an appreciation for sapphires’ rarity “and how hard you have to work to get what you get,” he added. “It’s not an easy process, even with big equipment and mechanization, and people do it because they love the stone.”
“I also think that one of the beautiful things about Montana sapphire is the mining process,” Brecken chimed in. “For me, it’s the best mine I’ve ever been to.”
Set on 3,400 acres in an area known by locals as Gem Mountain (also the name of a tourist sapphire mining operation adjacent to the mine), Rock Creek is the largest sapphire deposit in North America. It has been mined, on and off, since 1892, when prospectors in search of gold found some pretty pebbles that had washed down into what’s now called Sapphire Ranch. Since then, the deposit has produced more than 65 tons of sapphires.
“According to the old timers, the sapphires were so thick they would load them with coal shovels,” Warren Boyd, Potentate’s Toronto-based marketing director, told me as we admired a set of log cabins built by prospectors about 100 years ago. It was a sunny but brisk August morning with temperatures hovering in the 50s. “You can imagine a shovel full of sapphire would be pretty heavy.”
That’s because sapphires have a density of 3.98 grams per centimeter cubed, making them one of the densest gems around. Remember that detail—it’ll come in handy as I recount, below, some of the other fascinating things I learned about Montana sapphires on this trip of a lifetime!
When it comes to ethical sourcing, American-made gems are the gold standard.
While America lacks the depth and history of other countries’ gem deposits, it makes up for it with an incredibly broad and diverse selection of gems that are easy to trace and come with responsibility assurances that are all but impossible to find in many gem-rich nations. Of the gems that America produces, Montana sapphires are by far the most sought-after and most available.
To drill down even further, Montana is home to four sapphire deposits. The oldest and most storied is called Yogo Gulch in central Montana. The others are Dry Cottonwood Creek, best known for its orange and yellow sapphires; the Missouri River deposit located near the state capital, Helena; and Rock Creek, the only one of the four that produces enough volume to guarantee manufacturers a steady supply of goods, including calibrated stones (thanks to Potentate, which acquired the mine in 2014).
The Rock Creek Mine is a paragon of environmental responsibility.
Boyd, a rough gem and diamond valuation expert, has traveled to his fair share of mines. When he first visited Rock Creek in the 1990s, it made a deep impression on him.
“In my globe-trotting, I hadn’t seen anything like it,” Boyd said. “If this was in Madagascar, there’d be 50,000 people all over the hilltops, swarming and digging up all the dirt and washing it. And there’d be shantytowns to the side somewhere and it would look like a war zone. It’s so different the way America manages its resources.”
Potentate, the largest producer of sapphires in the Western hemisphere, must comply with strict environmental regulations set by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. “A lot of our delays this season have been about permitting issues,” Boyd said. “The DEQ comes in and says, ‘Well, you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that before you go into production.’ The environmental responsibility we have here is mandated—we have to pay huge cash bonds. Once we rehabilitate a certain area, the bond for that area is returned.”
The mine itself is alluvial, which means Potentate doesn’t have to dig underground. Instead, the company effectively mines the surface, where debris flows, or high-energy mud flows that have pancaked on top of one another over millennia, have deposited sapphires.
The land surrounding the mine is pristine Montana wilderness, home to elk, deer, bears.
“It’s about as green, so to speak, as you can get when it comes to gem mining,” said Jonathan.
Rock Creek’s fancy-colored sapphires weren’t always in favor.
For most of the mine’s history, its riches went largely unrecognized. Old timers talked about how “local kids used to come up here on wagons, and when they found the big sapphires, they’d use them as ammunition in their slingshots,” Boyd said. “They hit the squirrels and rabbits. So in theory, there are big giant sapphires just kind of salted around.”
Now why would they do that? In the raw, Rock Creek sapphires are primarily greenish. “Because they didn’t have heat-treating technology, they didn’t put much value to the sapphires that were not blue or pink or red,” Boyd said.
The mine’s production was mostly funneled to Switzerland, where watchmakers used the sapphires as jewels inside watch movements “because they weren’t quality enough for jewelry, but they were ideal for bearings,” Boyd said.
By the 1980s and ’90s, the “advent of electronically controlled ovens that permitted the use of various oxidizing and reducing atmospheres” made Rock Creek sapphires much more marketable, Boyd said.
Today, after the sapphires have been acid cleaned and heat-treated, they come in a broad palette of pastel hues that are popular with cutters and manufacturers—especially those in Rock Creek’s signature shade of blue-green. About five years ago, the market went nuts for the color. “There was a big push for that teal color,” Brecken said. “It came on strong right about the same time that Montana came to market.”
“And through the pandemic, it really gained in popularity,” Jonathan added.
Tourists can have their very own sapphire mining experience, which mimics the real thing on a much smaller scale.
On the eve of our mine visit, we got a lesson in sapphire mining at a “sip and sift” event on Philipsburg’s Main Street, where we dumped bags of gravel from the mine into screened trays, washed them in a sluice, and sifted through the muck in search of sparkly pebbles.
They key, we learned, was to shake the trays aggressively from side to side in the sluice, like a vigorous seesaw, so that its densest contents settled on the bottom. Then, once we took the trays back to our tables, the trick was to flip them over in one fell swoop so that any sapphires in the dirt would be easy to find atop the debris pile.
With tweezers in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other, I picked through mounds of dirt, marveling each time I discovered a sapphire. Unlike the brownish dirt, the gems stood out for being translucent and colorful.
The following day, as we watched a giant mechanized jig shake the heck out of a bunch of pay dirt at the mine, I realized the same principles were at work. “The higher-density stuff settles to the bottom of the jigs,” Boyd explained. “So when we clean out the jigs, it’s full of all the high-density minerals, including sapphires and gold.”
At least some of the gems we saw being mined will be on display at the Parlé booth at the AGTA GemFair in Tucson. Brace for higher prices.
While it would be impossible to pinpoint which of Parlé’s sapphires were mined during our visit, it’s safe to say that at least some of them came through the mine the week we were there.
“We have Montana trickling in all the time,” Brecken said recently.
At the brand’s booth at the upcoming AGTA GemFair in Tucson, expect to find a wide selection of Rock Creek’s signature teal sapphires, loose and set in finished jewels. “We’ve been working on building up our calibrated inventory so it’s easier for production,” Brecken said. “We do have a nice assortment of 2 carat-plus single stones in all the fancy colors. And some finished jewelry that will be at Centurion and make its way to Tucson.”
She noted that hexagon-cut stones are popular “because the shape fits so nicely with the crystal structure of Montana sapphires.”
As you prepare your shopping list for the gem shows, keep in mind that Montana sapphires in sizes over 1 ct. are less available at the moment and prices are up about 20% across the board. But don’t let that discourage you. For Parlé and its numerous fans (me included!), Rock Creek sapphires—colorful, plentiful, and ethically and environmentally spot-on—are worth it.
Top: Earrings in 14k yellow gold with 1.22 cts. t.w. Montana sapphires and 0.22 ct. t.w. diamonds, $2,545; Parlé
