A day in the life of a Sapphire Miner

Most days of the week you can find us working our mining claim for 6-8 hours - sometimes more! Our day begins early morning with setting up our claim for the day ahead. This includes laying out our tools for digging, putting fuel in the generators, moving all our 30+ big buckets from the wash plant to our digging site ready to use for the day and making sure the wash plant has water ready to wash the dirt! We dig surface wash to wash that is 8ft down, other miners have wash that is up to 50ft down, so then having an underground mine.

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To start the digging process, we use the jackhammers to loosen the dirt. Once we have a stockpile of loosened dirt clumps, we lay it out over a cleared area to be crushed. We use picks to crush our dirt so it is small enough to process through our wash plant. Then we shovel the piles of crushed dirt into buckets. Those buckets are loaded into our trailer and moved to our wash plant 100 meters away. Those buckets are processed through our wash plant, tipped one by one into the trommel which sorts the fine dust from the rocks and small clumps, which then the rocks and clumps slide down the shoot to the pulsator that sorts the sapphires and heavier rocks from the lighter rocks and dirt. Once all buckets have gone through the wash plant, we end up with a concentrated bucket of sapphires, zircons and the heavier rocks. We then use the willoughby to sort those heavy rocks from the sapphires and zircons to discover our days rewards!

On an average day we move and process a trailer load of dirt- sometimes more! Some days we can find a handful of sapphires, small and large, some days we can find nothing. It is hard, laborious, dirty work hand mining for sapphires, but we wouldn’t have it any other way!