Oregon Sunstones

The country leading out past Plush looked like something from a Zane Grey novel. It was early spring and everything was a pleasant shade of green. The road out to the mine and public area from Plush is a good road you just have to be careful and catch the turn onto 311. That road looked interesting as we drove by and we only realised it was our turn about 10 miles later. Arriving at the public dig site we discovered our trailer had blown a fuse and the battery had gone dead. We didn't have any extra fuses on hand so My aunt and mother drove over to the Dust Devil Mine to see if they had a 30 amp fuse. 5 minutes later they were back with three fuses, we hooked up the jumper cables and charged up the batteries. A large A-class was our only company at the area. It was getting late and I searched for sunstones until the sun set. In the morning we looked out of the window from our dinette table and watched as large clouds loomed in the distance. It was going to be a great day for mining unless there was a thunderstorm and rain. The clouds just seemed to float off and never caused us any problems infact the day turned out to be very sunny. We got to the Dust Devil and were greated by a friendly man whose name now escapes me. He showed us the pit and told us the mining rule of not digging anywhere there are tools left in the hole. "Those areas are being worked by others who want to finish" he told us. I didn't really know what I was doing but I scouted around for an area with workable matrix and set about digging it up. I had been digging furiously and breaking rocks up with my pick when I spotted several large stones. One of these stones turned out to be a diacroic sunstone. I showed it to my mother and to the mine dude when he came around to check on us. I ended up showing it to several people, people were coming up to me and asking to see it. The mine guy told me to put it deep down in my pocket and not to loose it. I thought 'boy this is easy' and I continued to work the area. At the end of the day I had two facet worthy diacroics and some other interesting stones. The conversation at the end of the day was lively and we talked to Don Bufford, one of the partners in the mine, for quite awhile. At the end we paid a very fair price for our really good stones and nothing for everything else.