Travels in San Diego

Newly discovered lepidolite specimen

If ever there was a time to drive up to Chief Mountain in the Pala District, shell out $60, and spend a couple of hours washing rocks under the blazing sun, this is it. The mountain, which lies just down the road from Mt. Palomar, is home to the Oceanview Mine, described by its owners as the last remaining professional gem mining operation in San Diego County. After years of blasting through worthless rock, the miners recently hit a string of pockets from which they’ve been extracting heart-stopping crystals. Some of that gem material will be made into faceted rings and necklaces and earrings to be sold in stores such as Tiffany’s. But some glittering pieces, overlooked by the miners, are being discovered every Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday by the customers who have paid to comb through the mine tailings.

I visited the mine the other day at the urging of Hallie Shere, who works in the marketing department at the San Diego Natural History Museum. I’d publicly expressed some disappointment that the museum’s new “All That Glitters” exhibit doesn’t pay more attention to San Diego’s amazing gem and mineral deposits and mining history. But Hallie reassured me the museum hopes to do more along those lines soon, and she also recommended that I talk to Jeff Swanger. 

Jeff Swanger

Swanger bought the Oceanview Mine in 2000. Now 51, he grew up in Escondido and often hiked in the backcountry. In the course of those rambles, he more than once stumbled upon abandoned gem mines and turned up enticing crystals. This sparked in him a passion for mining that was further enflamed as he learned about San Diego’s amazing gemological history. 

No other region in North America has yielded the number and quality of the gems and minerals that have come from the Pala and Mesa Verde districts in the mountain chain arcing through north-central San Diego County. Specimens from there have traveled to the finest mineralogical collections in the world, winding up in museums such as the Smithsonian, the British Museum of Natural History, the American Natural History Museum (in New York City), and others. The discovery of pink tourmaline in the late 1800s kicked off the first great boom. The dowager empress of China, Cixi Taihou, was wild about it, and she and her sycophantic court bought everything unearthed by the San Diego County miners and had it converted into snuff bottles, buttons, pins, and other trinkets. Other mines in the region yielded lilac-colored spodumene, along with garnet, morganite, and topaz. 

The overthrow of the imperial Chinese aristocracy in 1911 by Sun Yat-Sen abruptly ended San Diego’s first gem-mining boom, and world wars and the Great Depression kept most people’s minds off jewelry for a long time. But in the 1950s, many more spectacular finds were made of tourmaline, along with various forms of beryl, kunzite, garnet, blue topaz, smoky quartz, aquamarine, and other crystals. San Diego once again became known as America’s gem basket. 

Although skyrocketing mining costs and burgeoning government regulations were choking off mining by the 1980s, Swanger managed to get some practical mining experience by working part-time at the famously productive Stewart Mine in the Pala District. Owning his own mine became a dream that turned real with his purchase of the Oceanview Mine (first staked in 1903). 

Swanger told me he and a small crew of mining partners began around 2002 to bore into the mountain. San Diego’s gem miners don’t dig vertical shafts; their tunnels snake horizontally into the rock. Some three-quarters of a mile of such tunnels now penetrate the property. The miners walk into them, scrutinizing the walls for the veins of pegmatite – the coarse-grained igneous material that harbors the gems. 

Years at a stretch went by without their finding anything valuable, Swanger says. That’s why he had to add the public gem-screening operation, often salting the pile with crystals so that some customers would walk away with something. Swanger says before the recession hit, “We were sold out for every single day we were open. You couldn’t get in for six weeks.” 

The irony now is that even though fewer members of the public are showing up for the gem-screening opportunities, Swanger and his fellow miners have had a series of eureka moments over the last three years, so the opportunities to find treasure in the tailings have suddenly exploded. “Hundreds of specimens, from good to very fine” were recovered from one pocket uncovered in the fall of 2007, according to an article published in Rocks & Minerals magazine. Last winter Swanger’s group discovered more, including “half a dozen pieces that were just absolute knock-outs,” Mark Mauthner told me. 

Mauthner wrote the article about the Oceanview Mine in Rocks & Minerals.  A geologist and gemologist, he now works with Swanger’s group as a volunteer and consultant. Since last winter’s find, more pockets have yielded spectacular kunzite and tourmaline deposits. The most recently discovered one bore bi-colored tourmalines that in Mauthner’s judgment are “absolute gem quality…top-notch.”

Public screeners

For the public screeners of the Oceanview muck pile, “There’s an embarrassment of riches,” says Mauthner. “For instance the purple mica, lepidolite? A year ago, you would have been lucky to find a few pieces a day. Now they’re finding it by the bucketful, and they’re throwing it away.” One customer pulled out a kunzite nodule worth an estimated $1000. Swanger shrugged when I asked him how he felt about letting such treasure slip out of his hands. He says it’s not cost-effective for him and his partners to screen the tailings as closely as the public can, and “The more they find, the more they come.”

The muck pile

As to the big crystals being found by him and his crew, Swanger predicts some of them will wind up in museums; others may remain in the miners’ private collections. He says no matter what, they’ll continue mining. “Even if we found a $10 million pocket, we’ll be back lookin’ for the next one the next week.  It’s not about the money.”

Visitors to the Natural History Museum’s current All That Glitters exhibit can get a coupon for $5 off a visit to the Oceanview Mine, and mine visitors will get a $3 coupon to see the museum exhibition.