(upbeat music) - Hey, kids, thanks for showing up.

Welcome to Ron Coleman Mining.

My name is John, and, well, we're going to take a little tour around here to just show you what exactly we are into here at Ron Coleman Mining.

(upbeat music) We are up here in the public dig area.

We are taking this five-ton army truck down to the bottom of the mine, but you can see these piles of dirt right here, and the public out here digging through those and finding the crystals.

We're going to take you to the bottom of the mine here in a minute just to show you where this stuff is coming from.

(cheerful music) All right, we are in the bottom of the old Coleman Mine.

We're sitting about 170 foot deep into the ground right now.

You can see our equipment right here.

The excavators we use to dig this stuff out.

You can see the white quartz veins on the wall back here as well.

In the middle of those white quartz veins, you can see the crystals.

So, check this out.

You can see we got water coming down in there.

There's a spring that actually puts 650 gallons of water a minute into that hole.

So without pumping that water out, you'd be looking at Lake Coleman right now.

But this is where all the material's being dug from that ends up in the public dig area for you to dig when you come here and get your crystals.

Okay, so how they go about getting to the crystals.

They're deep underground, and they are in the sandstone, and sandstone is solid.

So what they do is they take the track drill, and they will drill holes down into the sandstone about eight foot deep, and then they'll pop some dynamite in there.

They'll put fresh tailings, which is, um, they're fine, it's actually like a real fine gravel.

Tamp that down on top of there and then get back away from it and run a line to it, and blow up the dynamite.

Blowing up the dynamite down into the hole will actually create stress fractures into that hard sandstone and then they can get the excavator in there and pull out chunks of rock to get that out of the way, and up to the dig area.

All right kids, let's show you a little bit about what we are doing here, what the finished product here looks like.

This is what everybody wants, look at these awesome clean crystals.

You can see all that red, dirty clay all over these things.

We got to wash 'em, and this is how we do it.

We got tables here.

We're going to spray these off with water, and then back to the vats they go.

That is oxalic acid.

Now, it's not as bad as it sounds.

It is coming from spinach so you can touch it, it's not going to pull out a skeleton hand, or anything like that.

It's pretty mild stuff.

We put a little bit of baking soda in that, that neutralizes that.

We can flush that right out of there.

So, dirty crystal, what we're getting after they come out of the acid, look how pretty.

(upbeat music) All right, now we're in our sorting room.

Now you could see a little bit of blue down on these tables, but right before we get ready to go to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, this thing will be stacked completely full.

You're looking at two and a half months or so worth of work for the boys, but it all just depends on what they're into down there.

I mean, you can fill this room with the right pocket if we can get to it.

Here's a whopper from the mine found not too long ago.

This is 34 and a half pounds of quartz crystal.

(upbeat music) And look how glorious.

As far as digging your own crystals, we got that right out there.

But we also have a one of a kind shopping experience for you as well.

You can see we have a world class rock shop here with some crystals.

We got some rocks from all around the world.

(upbeat music) All right, kids, we are here at the public dig area at Ron Coleman Mining.

Behind me, you can see the four and a half acre public dig area.

We changed our clothes, we grabbed our tools, and now we're getting ready to get up there and find some crystals.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) Well, kids, thanks for coming to the mine and checking out what we got going on here.

We definitely appreciate it, and thank you for being here with us today at Ron Coleman Mining.

We hope to see you soon.

(upbeat music)