Arizona Gems

CHERI SAUNDERS AND HER OPAL MINE A ROCKS TO Riches SAGA

The truck lurched to a stop at the edge of a rocky creek bed in the Atascosa Mountains a few miles north of the Mexican border. Mike Anderson reached for the lever to his right.

"Time for four-wheel drive," he said, pulling the gearshift into low.

We inched our way up a nearly vertical hill, following a road that was well on its way toward returning to Nature. Occasionally rocks the size of footballs spun away from the rear wheels, tumbling into ravines and disappearing into thickets of gnarled oaks and juniper trees.

"Believe it or not, when I started prospecting this area this road was even worse," said Cheri Saunders as the tires hit a hole and jolted her into Mike's shoulder.

"A year or two ago, a TV reporter from Tucson wanted to come out here to do a story on our opal mine. We'd barely got started down these hills when she had to get out of the truck. She couldn't handle it. She thought we were going to turn over and roll down the side of a mountain. This is very rugged country around here. Most people don't realize how rough it is."

It took a full hour to cover the four miles between Ruby Road and the Jay-R Mine, where Saunders found the first of her rare blue opals and launched a rocks-to-riches saga some 27 years ago. The find was the sort of thing that rock hounds and prospectors dream about: a pleasant day wandering in the Arizona outback that leads to a decent income and a satisfying vocation.

"I prospected all these hills looking for goodies," Saunders said, pointing to the rises that flank Ruby Road between Arivaca and Pena Blanca Lake about 60 miles south of Tucson.

"A prospector doesn't look for just one thing, you know. A prospector is an adventurer. I wanted to find a new pocket somewhere that nobody had ever found, and I did."

What Saunders discovered in that winter of 1969 was a pale blue vein harder than turquoise or malachite and more delicately colored than any gemstones she had previously seen. But the truth is, at the time, Saunders didn't know what she had found.

Saunders interrupted her narrative on the past as Anderson stopped in front of a wall of gray rock about seven feet high. She pointed to a vertical white stripe about as wide as a butter knife.

"When you see that, you're probably going to find opal," she said with authority. "This is mostly quartz and chalcedony here, but it's an indication that there may be opal underneath. There is a slight difference in the opal-bearing rock that we can detect. Well, maybe it's the other way around. We certainly know what rock not to find it in. There's a lot of that."

In 1969 neither Saunders nor her hus-band, James, realized they had stumbled upon a rare deposit of blue opals. Prospec-tors who originally came west in the 1950s to search for uranium, they had contemplated Arizona's geologic conundrums long enough to realize that what they had found in the Atascosas was very unusual, even if they didn't know precisely what it was.

Years later the Gem Trade Laboratory of the Gemological Institute of America analyzed samples from the Jay-R Mine and confirmed them to be natural opals, in this case blue ones.

Unfortunately James Saunders did not live long enough to realize the extent of the bonanza his wife had struck. The couple had staked six claims on the property, which is a part of the Coronado National Forest, in 1970, but James died of cancer in 1973. The Jay-R Mine became his memorial.

Before his death, James had taught his wife some basic mining skills. She knew a little about drills and jackhammers and how to set a dynamite charge. The couple also had bought a lapidary kit from Sears. For a while after James' death, Saunders worked the opal mine alone, bringing the raw minerals back to her home and cutting and polishing the stones.

At the same time, she took courses in jewelry-making. Eventually she met Mike Anderson, an avid outdoorsman, and they became partners in quarrying the opals. For several years, they painstakingly extracted the opals using a primitive drill, dynamite, and then long crowbars to pry through the fractured rock in search of the best deposits. In the process, they moved tons of rock in small wheelbarrow loads.

Eventually Saunders and Anderson moved 15 miles north of Sierra Vista to Whetstone, where they had the convenience of a gallery and workshop. At the time, Saunders was making pendants and bracelets and earrings, using settings she had designed and opals she had mined, and selling them at crafts fairs at Fort Huachuca. That's where representatives of the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, one of the world's largest markets for gemstones, found her.

"These people looked at our opals and told us it was pretty nice stuff, and they suggested we write a letter to the board of the gem show and that maybe we'd eventual-ly be accepted as participants," Saunders recalled.

A few years later, she and Anderson were accepted as exhibitors at the show, and their blue opals began to attract the attention of geologists and museum cur-ators from around the world. Specimens from the Jay-R Mine are now displayed in natural history museums in Vienna, Austria, and Ottawa, Canada, among other places.

Saunders and Anderson spend a month a year working from a makeshift camp ontheir one remaining mining claim. The rest of the year they cut and polish stones and make silver and gold settings for them. They sold or swapped the rest of their claims. In one case, they sold a half interest in a claim to a man who agreed to grade a passable road to their worksite.

Once they reach this remote spot, the backbreaking work may be very profitable, or it may be simply backbreaking.

"Our experience has been that we move tons and tons of rock for a little bit of opals," said Saunders "When we hit the high grade, it's wonderful because we've got good quality precious material that sells for as much as $200 a karat. But if we don't hit high grade, we've got a lot of lower-grade material that sells for be-tween $4 and $12 a karat.

"The difference between high grade and low grade is determined by the play of color in the opal," Saunders noted. "It's the sparkle within the actual opal. The background color is blue, but in the high grade, you'll see flashes of color; it's like a star sapphire. You'll see this star play-ing across the top of the stone. It's like a rainbow."

All of the labor has evidently paid off. Saunders now sells blue opal jewelry all over the world.

"I guess we're doing okay now," she said. "At least I was finally able to retire our old yellow wheelbarrow and buy that small dozer. That's something!"