Hi Canie. You’re right. It has been a long time since the last time I was in Barstow, which was 1965. I had an uncle that lived there. He worked for PG&E and when he retired he move to Placerville.

I use to walk along the bottom of a creek not to far from Barstow looking for “garnet.” We found some good specimens of blood red garnet that made some very fine rings and such.

We also dug for “opal” on Opal Mountain. It was a lot of hard work for something that was hard to find. Most of what we found was of poor quality, but every now an then we would find a good specimen. It looked a lot like the Mexican Fire Opal. From the amount of pits we found it wasn’t hard to see that we weren’t the only one’s that had been digging in that area. I wonder if there is anything left of the mountain. Take Care…Don in creepy town