Emerald Creek Garnet Area closed for season due to depleted gem supply

The city of St. Maries and its surrounding communities have long been known for two things: logging and an abundance of star garnets.

Though trees and their products remain available locally, the U.S. Forest Service announced on June 17 that the Emerald Creek Garnet Area has run out of its world-renowned, mine-it-yourself garnets only two and a half weeks into its usual four-month season. It closed to the public Saturday, and all ticket holders were refunded.

While garnets are not rare in the geologic world, Idaho state geologist Claudio Berti said, the star garnets found in the Idaho Panhandle contain an impurity that leads to "asterism" - a condition where an asterisklike star reflects off polished stones.

"In this case, the garnet is a variety called almandine," Berti said, referring to the minerals' dark, purplish-red coloration. "They're mostly made of iron, aluminum and silica and oxygen. In those garnets, there is also ... titanium oxide, which forms a mineral inside a mineral."

The titanium oxide shards are what catches the light in a "star" pattern. The stars are typically either four- or six-pointed. Though the gems have been reported occurring in other locations, such as Madagascar and the Carolinas, Idaho and India are the two major sources of star garnets.

The public has hunted for the Gem State's state gem in local rivers and hillsides for nearly a century and did so without regulation for much of that time. Their pillages would leave holes across the landscape, Panhandle National Forests spokesman Patrick Lair said in an email, and constituted both an environmental and human safety risk. The Forest Service excavated the Emerald Creek bed around 20 years ago to provide easier public access to garnet-rich material, dumping the sediment at what would become the Emerald Creek Garnet Area in St. Joe National Forest.

Tickets to sluice up to 2 pounds of garnets on the public land cost $16 - $6 for children - and rock hounds from across the country would sit at their computers, refreshing the sales website in order to secure one of the coveted spots. Even Berti, as the state geologist, has been unable to secure his family a set of tickets before.

St. Maries Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Aaron Nelson said the "significant majority" of visitors to the roughly 3,000-person city come for garnet hunting, contributing to the local economy in their quest.

But the star garnets in the Idaho Panhandle don't form overnight. In fact, most are spectacularly old, forming inside rocks that were held under the same intense heat and pressure that initially created the region's many mountains, essentially "cooking" the elements inside them.

Many of the gems were formed around 1.3 billion years ago, Berti said, and the rocks they were once buried within have long since weathered away. For comparison, Earth is widely thought to be about 4.5 billion years old, according to the International Planetarium Society.

But recreation is far from the only garnet market in Idaho, at least historically. Due to their hardness, garnets of all types are used in abrasive manufacturing.

Beginning in the 1930s, a company called Emerald Creek Garnets Ltd. began dredging large quantities of the garnets from the area for producing sandpaper, drill bits, polishing paste and other products. It was the largest garnet mine in the country, but shut down in 2022, per Idaho Geological Survey documents.

Berti said the company's shutdown was due to a lack of garnets remaining at the site from the historical extractions.

Garnets as a whole are not in danger of disappearing, Berti said. They are common minerals. It is the large, "pretty" garnets along Emerald Creek that are harder to come by, and it is largely illegal to collect them due to their presence being limited to private or otherwise regulated land.

"It's always good to remember, people, that despite how appealing this is and how cool it sounds like, it's a good idea to stick with the rules, because this is a very known site and there is patrolling," he said. "It's not worth it to get arrested for a garnet."

Now, a week after a social media announcement, the public Emerald Creek Garnet Area has closed for the rest of the year, citing an "exhausted" supply of excavated material for visitors to sift through. The last extraction by the Forest Service was in 2022, Lair said in his email.

"The National Forest is currently in conversation with partners and local government to explore options for excavating another supply from the adjacent creek for future years," Lair said. "Our surveys indicate there is more material in the existing channel that is expected to last for some years once it is excavated."

Trinity Daniels and Kenneth Kienbaum - the landowners of two other garnet dig sites, the nearby Fossil Bowl and the Huckleberry Garnet Mine business - are critical of how the Forest Service has dealt with their depleting garnet store.

Huckleberry Garnet Mine functions similarly to the Emerald Creek Garnet Area in that Daniels and Kienbaum excavate raw materials from a specific site and move it to an accessible site. Tickets are $5 per person and $40 per pound of garnet collected. Most of the star garnets from the private sites tend to have four points or the titanium oxide "star silk" spread throughout, just below the gem's surface.

Daniels and Kienbaum said they encourage folks to visit both the Huckleberry and Emerald Creek areas to find the widest variety of garnets, and the Forest Service routes customers back to them if prospective miners show up without a reservation. Visitors can also mine for fossils at Huckleberry Garnet Mine.

"Any resource, especially mining, it's a depleting resource over time. And I think there could have been a lot better transparency with the public because (the Forest Service) knew - and we know they knew because we've had these discussions with them over the last decade about their quantity of material that they were getting," Daniels said.

Over the years, she recalls seeing more and more restrictions on visitors to the area. Reservations were first. Then, there were party size limits, time limits, and garnet limits.

"That's been on their side trying to cut that down to manage what they have left," Daniels said. "But the public doesn't - I don't think the public understands that, because it's not well-published or well-known.

"So there is an opportunity there for more of a public awareness campaign."

Instead, families who booked reservations three months ago have in cases been left scrambling, stuck with hotel stays, plane tickets and other reservations that cannot be altered easily.

"On the business side, even if you issue refunds, you're not supposed to sell them something you know you can't give them," Daniels said. "There's a huge, I would say, blow-back from the public about this."

To accommodate travelers whose plans were uprooted by the shutdown, Huckleberry Garnet has extended its operating hours, but Daniels says that as a two-man team, there is only so much they can do.

The Forest Service is "committed to continuing this service in the future because we know what a special experience it is and know how important it is to the public," Lair said in his statement. But Daniels wonders whether the area should reopen at all if it will only continue exhausting what remains of the star garnet. Kienbaum added that while he thinks there are pockets of garnet remaining on the land, it would take years of studies and planning before excavation is on the table.

"The original intention of creating the Emerald Creek recreation site was to stop the pilfering of the hillsides and the streams and things like that and have a more managed garnet digging site," Daniels said. "When it no longer serves the purpose or intention that it was originally designed for, they really need to take something else into consideration."

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