Shaun Newman Podcast - #1108 - Tim Lukinuk

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

Tim Lukinuk is the co-owner and general manager of Amethyst Mine Panorama, a multi-generation family-run working amethyst mine and popular tourist attraction near Thunder Bay, Ontario. Alongside Lori Lukinuk, he continues the legacy started by his parents, who acquired the site in the early 1980s; Tim has been involved since his teens and brings deep knowledge of the region’s geology and the story of Ontario’s official provincial mineral. Cornerstone Forum 26’https://shaunnewmanpodcast.substack.com/Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

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This is James Lindsay. This is Vance Crowe, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast. Folks, happy Tuesday. How's everybody doing today? While we finally got into our campsite near Emsdale, Ontario. We're kind of in that near vicinity. And the kids are off to camp.

for the week so super cool um mel has our entire life uh structured and lined up quite perfectly she gave me one day where we could uh i didn't realize she couldn't find a campsite so i got to you know do the we're going to see if we can get to a place and and uh camp and well the first one we we tried getting into which was this beautiful campground um was a first comfort surf needless to say it did not work out so we didn't find our campsite until like eight o'clock at night but We did get into one. And regardless, I appreciate Mel, Mel's way of doing things very, like, structured. So we made it to our campsite, another beautiful campsite, I might add, near Emsdale.

And we're here for the week. And you're going to, the next couple episodes, man, they've been not scheduled. And today with Tim, it's the first ever, I say it in the episode, but it's the first ever walking podcast I've ever done. So there's no video today on this one, but we'll get to that in a second. When it comes to precious metals, we're talking silver, gold, all the things, buying, selling, storing precious metals. Look to Silver Gold Bull, all right? Down in the show notes, you can contact Graham for any conversation, any questions you have, right?

You can text or email them. He loves hearing from you guys. And just go on to Silvergoldbillbill.com. I'm just going to pull it up here real fast. You can take a look at the charts. Oh, what's the old silver wagon doing today? $89. It's up 0.29%.

Regardless, I've been paying attention to the silver wagon for quite some time. And if you don't own any precious metals, make a phone call. Shoot a text. Find a little bit more out about it. Here in Canada, I know we stare at a lot of things, not only the federal government's doing, but other governments are doing, provincial governments, all those things.

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but snowmobiles there as well. And they're open Monday through Saturday. If you're driving through, you should really stop in and see Ryan's the manager, Al's the owner. They're awesome guys. you can stop in and see the showroom. Of course, if you're just a little further out, you can go to rectech power products.com

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and I get notes from it saying, you know, here, this, this, this, regardless. When it comes to Internet Security, I look to PlanetCom, Carl and his team, You can find them at planetcom.com.ca. They've been doing it for over 23 years now. And when it comes to IT, these are the guys I turn to. The S&P Road Trip has been powered by Zeebs. It's a family-owned fine-tuned in Chestermere, Alberta.

And that's Zeebs Performance Restorations. They deliver expert classic car restorations, custom exhaust, and performance upgrades. I know when I was talking to Zane's dad, Brian, they can do things to a lot of different vehicles that can really increase your fuel efficiency. So if that sounds like something you might be interested in, you know, especially with the gas prices, I don't know what they're doing back in Alberta right now. The highest we found across northern Ontario was two bucks. And, you know, I just hit $1.47 here on the trip coming into Emsdale.

So we finally found something a little lower or a little more resembling Alberta. And if you were looking to get a little better fuel efficiency out of your vehicle, Maybe Zeebs is something you should be looking into, zibs.ca, okay? On Substack, a couple cool things going out. If you missed it yesterday, we had Carla Treadway on the podcast, and then I did some bonus questions with her afterwards. So if you're a paid member, that is a perk. The Tanner-N-A-Masterclass has been releasing each week.

That's a perk. And the week in review is for everyone. If you can't keep up to the podcast, I've had lots of people text me about that. There's a week in review, kind of, you know, read through, see what all the guests are and pick your favorite and go go take a listen if you're listening or watching on spotify apple youtube rumble x facebook substack make sure to subscribe make sure to leave a review if you're enjoying the show share with a friend all right that's what i got for you today

now let's get on to that tail of the tape today's guest is the owner of the panorama amethyst mine i'm talking about tim lukenook so buckle up here we go Welcome to the mine. My name's Tim Luckinuck. My wife Laurie and I own the mine here. So amethyst mine panorama. We're located just outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario. And we mine amethyst here. So it's pretty simple. We're up here during the summer. It's kind of a seasonal operation. So you don't do it in the wintertime. No. Once the winter comes, well, especially we've got a good size hill on the way in. Once it gets a lot of ice and snow, it's not always easy to get up here. But we use lots of water is probably the main area. So we shift into Thunder Bay. So in Thunder Bay we have a store with a workshop in the back.

And that's where I spend the winter. I have saws and tumblers and polishers. So I take the amethyst that we mined here during the summer and we bring some of it into Thunder Bay, and that's where I'll cut and polish and tumble. And so I make rough tumbling material, for example, that we make into jewelry. You'll see gift items in our store.

Bigger pieces, I'll slice. I can make clock faces and... faces and bases for what I call it, pen sets and things like that. How on earth do you just buy a mine? Like what were you doing before this? You'll have to ask my father that question. Oh, he's passed on. Oh, so is your father who came about this mine?

He was kind of a serial entrepreneur. He did a lot of things during his life. He was a forestry. He was involved in law. But he was always involved in the outdoors. He liked truckers and guys that work in the mines. And around here we call it the bush, the forest industry. So this mine came up for sale in around 1980, and that's when he purchased it.

So my parents, Steve and Lorna, were mining here for 40 years or more. So to the listener, like, we're about to walk into the mine, but the mine looks honestly like a little bit of a ravine. That's, you know, you got rock on both sides. And honestly, it's just a pit. Like, I mean, when I first came in, I was like, I don't know what. I was expecting, but it wasn't this because it, you know, it looks just like a little bit of a hole dug over the course of 60 years, I might add. That's right.

So it's a slow process of getting the amethyst out. It is, yeah, and we're mining really slow. The first owners of the mine, the Hartfixen family out of Port Arthur, which is now Thunder Bay, Ontario. Sure. At that time, it was more of a wholesale operation. They were getting pieces, about 100 pounds or less, chunks of amethyst, lots of grain. lots of granite. They would sell that as wholesale and lots in Thunder Bay and area.

There's lots of fireplaces made out of amethus. So the granite was really good to grab into the concrete and then you'd have these faces of purple. But over the years, people use fireplaces a little bit differently now. Sure. And instead of operating as a wholesale, we kind of are into more of what you might call a retail operation. So, yeah, we are in the quarry. It's about, let's say, 15 meters wide. Sure. That happened about a billion years ago. We're in what's called a fault zone. So the rock here, the granite was faulting 1,000 million years ago. And it opened up this width, the 15 meters. The host rock here is this pinkish red granite. So the granite essentially fell into the hole, this 15 meters. And then from down below, hot water started coming up. So the geologists would call this a hydrothermal deposit means hot water. But in that hot water was dissolved.

elements and minerals. And as it came up, it started to cool and it started to crystallize into the mineral quartz. And what makes amethyst here is really in the quartz, there's a little bit of the mineral iron. And the iron gets trapped in these crystals. It plays with the light a little bit. And we end up with purple quartz.

Purple quartz is what people call amethyst. And then, I mean, like, this is, Tim doesn't know me, folks. And obviously, I've been, we're, we're on a road trip across Canada, right? So Mel goes to me, now we're going to stop at an amethyst mine. And I went, we're going to stop at a what? And then I look, you know, then she shows me.

I'm like, oh, yeah, I've seen this everywhere. Are these mines like all across Canada or they're just few? Yeah, just mostly outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario. There's a zone here. It's about 20 kilometers long. Where amethysts can be found. Yeah, maybe five kilometers thick. You know, there's always exceptions to that.

But that's where most of the. amethyst minds are. Several of the amethous minds are open to the public. So panorama here, we're open to the public. We have billboards and people come here to see what we're doing, talk to people like me. You get a podcaster, stumbles in. It's easy to talk to people. I'm like, I wonder if you'll talk to me for a few minutes. Sure. So yeah, we talk to people. A lot of people are like you. What's going on? Why is it here? Why is it purple? What do you do with it? So we try to explain all that what we call a tour and, you know, you can talk to me or my wife. I'm from Alberta and we have, and then, of course, we just came from Manitoba with their quarries and mining and different things.

I guess, like, in the tour, when she pointed out how many feet down to Amethyst goes, 150, and right now you're roughly 50 down. And I was doing the mound. And you've been here 60 years. I'm like, man, it must be a very slow process. It is, yeah. So we're kind of, there's no big, I call it, no big trucks here, no big tractors. we use hand tools like shovels and pry bars. You'll see water holes.

And a sprinkler. The sprinkler, because all these little pockets, the amethus forms in these little openings. They're called a VUG. Some is in vain material. But you think of the amethyst as glass. So it breaks pretty easy. So if you're in here with the tractor or the back hole kind of thing,

you're just really breaking these crystals. We're trying not to break the crystals. So what's the, like I see different sizes. What's the largest amethyst? rock that you've found. Well, they're all minerals. So it's not a rock. So it's a mineral is really one thing.

Okay. And the biggest crystals I've seen, you might be able to see them in the store. There's a big one. The one I can think of is maybe 30 centimeters tall and it weighed about 30 pounds. So let's say 15 kilograms, one great big single crystal. And for a guy who owns a mind when you find that, is that like big money or is this like? Well, it's big excitement. This is a small business.

I hate to use the word big money, but we're doing okay, we do what we can. We're only seasonal, that's part of the business. So what are you doing the rest of the time? You're polishing and making things out of the amethyst. In Thunder Bay, yeah. So that's one of the things that makes us distinctive here. We mine during the summer and then off season in the city of Thunder Bay, we make things. So I'm always tumbling and polishing, and we have crafters that help us put together jewelry.

You'll see bookends once in a while or that kind of thing. you'll see a variety of gift items and just amethyst from the mine. And the amethyst changes too. So what we're looking at here on the ground is like all over the ground. It's like several, let's say three or four square meters of essentially purple. There's not very many six-sided crystals in here. Some people have seen amethysts that comes out of Brazil. They're protected in these little round.

They're essentially a gas bubble called a geode. Ours are in veins. So this was a big thick vein, maybe say 20, 30 centimeters thick. No six-sided terminations, but beautiful purple. And so this is what I collect. We can make jewelry out of that. I can cut it and polish it, tumble, think pendants and earrings. Yeah, that's where I've seen it the most is jewelry, just in general. Jewelry, yeah. And then once in a while, you mentioned that big crystal. Sometimes the crystals are fantastically beautiful. They're just awesome by themselves. But often just the formation,

and they're not always, let's call it beautiful. They're pretty interesting, but the big crystal we talked about where it's like 30 centimeters tall, many of those all slice. Slice like a small loaf of bread or a football. Slice it like you're slicing a loaf of bread. I polish those slices,

and that's the raw material that we make clocks out of and the bases, flat things. And it's really, really, really beautiful purple. You can put those slices up, that piece of bread up to the light or, you know, the sun or a light bulb, And you can see inside it. It's really interesting growth veins.

It's not all like solid purple. You'll see areas of purple, different colors, white. Really fascinating. And all this stuff's like a thousand million years old. So unbelievably old. We're also mining, you talk about mining slow, right? So there's no big trucks and tractors here. But all these minerals are non-renewable.

So we're really trying to look after literally every piece of purple. Try not to waste it. Some is jewelry grade. Some is special. Gessamine grade. Lots and lots goes out to what we call the digging area. That's where families coming from, you know, all over the world kind of thing Driving by they're in the area some people, especially from the United States, other places They'll come up here because they're interested in rocks and minerals themselves. They want to collect their own minerals And then actually I was just talking to a fellow in the digging area. He takes these pieces and he polished them himself

He lives in Wisconsin and he makes his own jewelry out of this purpose So everything's literally everything that's purple has got to use. What's something about an amethyst mine owner that people don't understand? Oh my goodness. I don't know. Why are we doing here? Or, you know, not why we're doing it. But it's like a small business.

So don't think of a big mine. You think just of a small owner. Yeah, you're not thinking these big giant trucks hauling out a ton of gravel on earth and everything. And often it's a passion project. So think of like maybe a baker or something. You know, it can often be a small bakery. Guy does his own thing, gets up at 5 o'clock in the morning or 3 o'clock to make his bread. And that's kind of what we have here.

And also a family business. So again, maybe the bakery is a good analogy. Sure. Or a farm, family farm. We have a family business. My parents, I mentioned earlier, they purchased the mine in 1980. So I've been here since I was a teenager. My children were here.

They worked when they were kind of the age, teenage at the mine, giving tours and talking to tourists. Some of them help us make jewelry. They're a little bit older now. I've had nieces and nephews and my sisters. Everybody's been here. And one of the cool things, again, is a family business. So we live in the city of Thunder Bay, my wife and I, but we spend the summer out here at the mine. But across the way, just up from the mine, they're,

In Northern Ontario, we call them camp. So it's like a camp. Some people know it as a cottage. So we live out here during the winter. There's a few beautiful lakes around. We saw them coming in, yeah. Yeah. And even at the end of the quarry, just here.

It's a beautiful lake. It's like 70 feet deep. We go swimming sometime. We might have a campfire. There's speckled trout in there. You can go fishing. And so you work during the day, have a campfire, have some family time in the evening. So that's something kind of unique, kind of different.

for this kind of business? Well, along the road trip so far, I got to interview a bee farmer for the first time, which was fascinating. And then, you know, everything Manitoba keeps coming up in my brain, but then there was a lady who grew up on Churchill

and by the polar bears and her experience there. And that was, you know, and just wild. And then you hear mine, and my brain goes to, you know, this big giant mine where thousands of men are going in or, you know, maybe Saskatchew, Saskatchewan with potash and underground and big machinery and different things.

And then you come here and it's just, that's probably what's most surprising about it is it's unbelievably pretty. Like the purple is purple, you know? Well, that's, you've touched on a few things. One thing, a lot of mines when they're mining something, they're just, you know, mining essentially dirty rock kind of thing. You can't see what they're really mining. Even gold mines.

You don't see flakes of gold all over the place. or as you mentioned, they're underground so it's not safe to go underground or there's lots of big trucks and tractors and men around. We don't have that so it's real family friendly. You can come in up close. We put it out in the digging area

and you can definitely see what we're mining this beautiful purple stuff all over the place. Going back to your dad for a second when he bonded in 1980, did you ever ask him, Dad, why are we buying an amethyst mine? You shouldn't ask me that question. You should be asking.

my mother because I think he just kind of, he was that kind of guy. He just went out and made a decision. So my mother was more than hesitant, let's say that at the very beginning. But as you might expect, after a while, she ended up doing more work than everybody else combined. So dad was out here at the mine all the time. My mother was in Thunder Bay a lot of the time running the store, paying the bills, doing all that kind of stuff. And she ran our store, Amethus Gift Center. So she got good So if anyone's coming through the Thunder Bay area, obviously they can stop in here in the summertime and see the actual process of how it comes about and then obviously go dig for some themselves, which the kids just had a lot of fun doing. Of course, if they're in Thunder Bay in different months, there's an actual store where you can see, basically the storefront where you can see all the products that come from Amethyst or all the, I don't even know, products probably not the right word, Tim. It's just the things you can buy that have been made.

Yeah, and this isn't that pretty cool to think that we've made it, our family, or we've mined it, we've made it, and then we retail. Sorry, I played hockey in Dryden for three years, right? So I used to come to Thunder Bay all the time. And for some reason, if I rack my brain, mum will listen to this some point in time. And she'll be like, I told you about this. You never wanted to go because I'm sure she stumbled into one of probably several shops in Thunder Bay.

that had an amethyst. And I just, you know, young teenager, right? Didn't think of anything. Oh, yeah, whatever, Purple Rock. Yeah. But now with kids and doing the tour of Canada, it's very unique. And our store in Thunder Bay Amethyst Gift Center is south part of town, Victoria Avenue.

So the first part of the store is a retail store, just selling our amethyst, jewelry, and gift items, things like that. The middle part of the store is the building. You can see it. There's desks there. We call that the assembly area. So that's where the crafters are. working you can see them putting together what we've just made jewelry or gem trees

things like that and then I work in the back third of the building that's a Lapidary workshop lapidary is someone that works with cuts and polishes the stones like this and that's where my tumblers are my diamond saws so that's where I am I grind and polish but if people do visit especially we do a group tours often people will come they're interested in shopping but if off season when I'm in the store, I'm able to do a little bit of a tour. So it takes 10, 15 minutes. We just walk people through the workshop, show them what they're doing, show the tumblers and polisher's. And most people are really interested, they're interested just like you are. Where does this stuff come from?

What are you doing with it? How did this start? And then I think they're always surprised that they find something local. It's from Thunder Bay. A lot of times when you're traveling around the world, right, you're almost desperate to find a local, authentic, super. from that area. It's easy to buy a t-shirt or something like that. Amethyst, we're pretty lucky in Thunder Bay. You can buy something that's, you know, uniquely, honestly, right from this area. Yeah, super cool. And then just on amethyst, I think you already said it, but like amethyst is just a pretty rock. It's not like all of a sudden it's put in a jet engine and it can shoot, I don't know, purple missiles or some silly thing, right? Like,

it's nothing like that. No, amethyst is quartz. So quartz is a real common mineral and you probably know that quartz is used for many things. You can make, well, the quartz is, it's really silicon dioxide. So they take the oxygen out and you're left with silica. So you can make silica chips. You can make solar panels. You can make silicon even cocking around your bathtub. So it has many, many industrial uses.

But the amethyst, there's really not that much of it. And it's not big masses. Like quartz you can get a big mountain. It could be a quartz mountain. Sure. Or quartzite or even quartz sand. So you can use it on an industrial scale. This is pretty small.

And the purple also is caused by iron and other impurity. So often when they're working with quartz, they really want pure quartz. They don't want these different colors and iron and a bunch of junk. But having said that, the highest and best use for this purple quartz is jewelry and decorations and stuff. Why would you ever want to crush this up? I was reading on one of your signs talking about the Egyptians, how they used to use amethyst, with their higher ups.

That's right. Well, part of it, purple is a pretty rare color in nature. In nature, yeah. And so, yeah, back, there's legends, grab our brochure. You can read about ancient Greece or the pope has a purple ring, right? So to bishop. So it's got all kinds of historic legends. Well, once again, you're pointing to rare, right?

Rare. If it was common, you know, then, you know, everybody would have it. But when it's unique or rare, then you start to see it used for, kings and popes and all the high high up. And part of that, I think it was around the 1880s, they found huge deposits of amethyst in Brazil. Have you ever been? I've never been, but you'll see these geodes of these round balls you see in gift shops. There isn't an amethyst conference where you all meet up in exchange.

Well, we're so much smaller than those places. Those places aren't more of an industrial scale. We're just small, just like what you see here. You get to talk to the owner. I'm like, I laugh because I'm like, I'm walking around. Once again, I'll try and paint a picture for the listener. I'm walking around and I'm listening to you. I'm like, guy either works here or knows a lot about Amethyst.

And it's cool to see that the owner is sitting right here and your wife for that matter. And the wife, she knows what. We've had some good staff. They're all students. They've been here, some of them seven or six years. But yeah, I think that's pretty cool. You get to talk to me. I talk to visitors all the time.

Well, I tell you what, you're first on the podcast. for actually doing a walking interview and walking into a mine. Well, let's go up here. Sure. I know you don't have a camera. Maybe you'll take a few pictures. Well, I got my, for the audience, I do have my cell phone. I have snapped a couple as we've been going.

But yeah, I didn't, I was like, I don't know how I'm going to film this as we're walking. So, yeah, a little different, maybe later. So here's a different part of the quarry. A lot of the quarry here is you'll see the pink igneous granite. So it's all been broken. And then I mentioned the hot water. came up with the minerals, which is quartz, and some of its white quartz, but lots and lots of it is purple. And they form in these little openings called a vug. And here's one here. Some

are vugs are maybe a meter long, sometimes a lot smaller than that. And then we can, in these vugs, you can see the crystals. So we can see the crystals. Sometimes the crystals are stuck in the walls. Sometimes they come loose. So we're always collecting, trying to be careful, as much as we can anyway. And then on the ground definitely just tons, literally tons of these purple pieces. A lot of them, the way the crystals grow, it's kind of, they break apart finger and thumb

size and shape. And so little wee pieces down to, well, think, imagine what you'd use for an earring, just a little something of few centimeters. And these thumb ones are good for tumbling. When you're back at the store, right, and you're doing your thing and making crazy

looking jewelry or just beautiful looking jewelry, you shouldn't say crazy. How long does it take, right? Because I look at this and I'm like, it feels like there's about a million earrings sitting here. There is. And so, yeah, but it takes a lot of work. Because it's all handmade? It is.

And the earrings are really small, so you have to go through a lot. So we spend hours and hours sorting to get the right size and right shape, right color. And then with earrings in particular, you have to find two pieces that are kind of similar in size. So the crafters spend a lot of time just trying to find pieces that are similar. But it's kind of neat. It's what we do. We're really quite proud of it. We, you know, we mind and we make things.

Yeah, I think of, you know, the road trip so far, Tim. Like, this is as unique as it gets. Like, this is pretty darn unique. Yeah, it's pretty cool for sure. So we're glad you were able to come down in the quarry. You can see the amethyst in place. This is what it looks like. Well, actually, it changes a lot.

So some years we're getting, say, fist-sized pieces of purple. Sure. Down at the west. we get little wee small ones, like a few centimeters thick. Are you all curious of what 150 feet down looks like? We are, but I'm not sure we'll get there. We're taking layers off the bottom here, and it's about, I don't know, say 500 meters long. Sure.

But it takes about 20 years to take one of these layers off. So it'll be your kids, kids, kids, eventually. Somebody else, yeah. So it's kind of slow, careful. We don't see that the amethyst is ending at depth. It seems to continue. You can see what we're mining here when we're down, say, 50 feet. So hopefully somebody's here for a while.

And then it's interesting because it does it. It goes up and down. It's not like it's all of a sudden a football field width-wise. Like eventually you just hit the end of it and it's just a small little seam. It seems to be. Yeah, it's a seam. Think of a vein 15 meters wide. Just a big crack.

At the west end, though, it does go under the lake. We mentioned earlier, a beautiful elbow lake. Yes. So there's no doubt there's amethyst. under the lake. Early days, the first owners of this place thought they might drain the lake to get at the amethyst, but that'll never happen. So we're now back a boat from the lake about 100 meters, so we can't go any further west. And then to the east, it does seem to peter out, just up here. I've been scratching around the backhoe the last couple of years,

digging, there's overburdened. So we don't know if it pinches out. Maybe it shifts down below. We don't really know what happens to it. It might end. But actually, if you continued, well, let's go east. east from here. Well, we don't have to go there, but there's another cluster of amethes mines directly to our east. And so this big crack, and if we go the other way, directly to our west, maybe three or four kilometers, there's another cluster of amethus deposits there. Probably not in the same big single vein. There's probably several veins that come through this area. I mentioned about 20 meters or 20 kilometers long, maybe five kilometers thick, where most of the purple

this amethyst and Thunder Bay is located. Well, I appreciate you doing this with me. I'll be far from an amethyst expert, but at the same time understanding a little bit about it and to any Canadians listening, or heck, my American listeners for that matter or elsewhere, you're ever in the region, coming to see something that's definitely unique.

And coming down here, it's even more unique experience from just looking down into the mine. And it's suitable for all ages. We like young kids in Ontario. Well, a lot of times children in grade four in Ontario, for example, they're learning about rocks and minerals. So we love the little kind of kids at that age. They're really excited about rocks and minerals.

We give them a tour. We do field trips in the spring and the fall of classes come out here, learn. They get to dig their own, take it back. How cool is that? Very cool. Well, as we walk back, I have two questions for you that have. nothing to do with amethus how's that sure go ahead well before we go sure um I'm gonna turn the hose on why don't you maybe film some of the color and sure sure I can do

that so Tim folks is turning on a couple things and I'm just gonna take a video here of what he's a what he's got going on I'll put it on social media so you can kind of see it's an interesting way to mind if I'm being honest with myself you know like he's got a essentially a fire hose and I wish you guys could all well I mean you can see it I'll post the video of it maybe I'll get jacked overlaid out as I'm talking here but like it's it's you know you think of like big trucks and back hose and just different things to drill bits and it's water it's rinsing the rock you know like this is this is the mine Yeah, really cool stuff.

There, here I found a little crystal for you. So we just brought it out of the mine. We're mining now, there's a lot of purple. You might see the purple in the base and the side. And they're covered with this white quartz. So that's a little distinctive just in this area. But in this piece you might be able to see. They all have six sides.

So quartz, well all minerals have a habit, it's called. The way they like to form, quartz like to form in a hexagon with six-sided shape. So we can see the one, two, three, three, four, five, and six sides. This one's been a little bit chipped for some reason, either during the mining process or more likely as the crystals were growing, they bumped into each other. But we get crystals like this,

and if it's beautiful and interesting, is the six sides, that great. But again, most of our business really is using just the purple stuff, cutting and polishing, making jewelry. And there's just literally tons and tons of it. And this is a crystal, I don't know, that's say an inch high, you know, three centimeters or so. Some of these crystals can be 30 centimeters high, but they're not everywhere.

Different generally at the far end of the quarry, small crystals, smaller than this. Middle of the quarry, that's where the big, great, big 30 centimeters crystals are. And up here, there's a lot of vein material where it's solid purple. Well, you can see the veins maybe on the walls here. Yeah, well, I think when I scan it with the phone, like you can just see it. Like, it's so vibrant. Yeah, yeah. Especially when you hit it with water.

Fantastic color. And that's what we do with the water. So when we tumble and polished during the winter, when it's polished, it always looks wet. So that's what it makes awesome, awesome jewelry. And again, people come and collect their own, because lots of people do tumbling and polishing and use pieces like this to make their own gift items. Yeah. This is a long one.

I don't know how long is that? Probably three inches, maybe, something like that, three and a half. And again, roughly the size of your finger, the thickness of your finger, but you can see the purple. So that could either be wire wrap just as it is. a good size pendant or I could tumble it and we we do the same thing make it tumble polish pendant so we collect these all summer and try and do something with them during the winter very cool well once again thanks for pulling me down here for the

audience once again I've left Mel and the kids in the vehicle I'm sure she's going where did he go you can imagine Tim my wife has an interesting time as I see interesting people and I'm like I just go talk to that person The two questions that I've been asking everybody. The first one's a political question. I'm just curious, you know, like when I was growing up, Quebec was having their referendum, their second referendum. And that was 1995.

And I just remember being, I was pretty young back then. And now as I get older, Alberta's about to have their referendum. And I'm like, I wonder what Canadians think about it. Coming from Alberta, it's kind of the talk, right? Everywhere you go, you hear. about it. And the further east I go, I'm just kind of curious what people think. Did they even care? About Alberta and separation? Yes. Well, I don't know, similar with maybe this Quebec stuff, every region's proud of their own, you know, region, certainly, as you know, Quebec's proud

of Quebec and everybody wants to do their own thing. But we're all Canadians. I think we should kind of stick together. We've got more good things going than we've got bad things. And Canada, Well, you know, it's a pretty awesome country. Lots of pretty awesome, you know, the provinces and the territories and stuff. So my thought just were a lot better altogether. And things, it's often people sometimes think, same as maybe when you get divorced or something, oh, I'm going to get divorced, and my life's going to be better.

Most of the time it's not better. It's actually worse. So you need to be careful before you jump into these things. And I think a lot of it is the politicians, too. there seems to be leverage or anger or something. You want to stir people up and have them fight. That's a lot easier than trying to get people to work together and cooperate sometimes. And my final one for you is we're on a year-long road trip.

And I've been curious people's favorite memory from a road trip or camping trip, whatever you prefer. You could pick as a father or a son. You mentioned, you know, having a cottage here. and every summer you're working the amethyst, mine, and then, you know, you spend your summers out here. Do you have a fond memory of being on the road? We certainly do, and you're quite right.

We're a seasonal-based business, so we're working here all the time. But back, well, when my kids were young, they were, let's say, 10, 12. So one of my favorite memories is in Saskatchewan. So they're called the Tunnels of Moose Jaw. Yeah, sure. We went through them on the way here. Awesome. We dropped in there.

Our girls were, I know, age 10, maybe age 12, something like that. We enjoyed tremendously learning about Al Capone and the gangsters and smuggling alcohol. And then part of that trip, we purchased young adult novels. So back when my girls were a little bit young, we didn't have computers and cell phones and all that kind of stuff. So as we drove, my wife would be driving, I would read those novels about Moose Jaw out loud. And 20 years later, let's say, my daughter's got... her children of her own. So she phones us up and says,

Mom, Dad, do you still have those novels from the tunnels of Moosh Jaw? And so we sent them down to her so she can read them to her own children. So, yeah, we hope that our memory, childhood memory transfers to my daughter's family also. In today's age, I'd be curious, your daughter, when she gets through some books, if the kids enjoy it, because our kids enjoy reading. but the times I've tried reading to him, Tim, they've been like, uh-huh. And they almost check out. I'm like, oh, maybe it's dad's voice.

I don't know. Well, when you're traveling in the car, you don't have much of a, they can't escape. Yeah, we didn't have, we didn't have cell phones or whatever. But anyway, that was our, one of the favorite memories. And the other one, I know you're doing a big tour. If you ever get to the Black Hills of South Dakota, that's a pretty cool place. And one out of the way place we saw there was, I think it's called the mammoth site.

So it's not too big. It's about the size of a hockey arena back in the day, you know, 10,000 years ago or so. Animals would fall into this pond and they couldn't get out. So now it's all full of these big mammoth bones and skulls and tusks. And they put like a roof on it, just like a hockey arena. And you can, there's boardwalks and stairs, and you can get really close. You can see these bones sticking out. out of the soil just like it's an archaeological site you've probably seen on television.

Well, Tim, I appreciate you taking a few extra minutes out of your day. I mean, this is your day, but humoring a guy from Alberta who's never been to an amethyst mine before, appreciate it very much. We're glad very much that your family dropped in and spent some time here, and I wish I was traveling with you for the rest of your vacation. It sounds epic. Well, I hope the odd SMP listener drops in and says hello because it, I don't know, it's a unique spot to have a mine right here that you can walk up to. And then the vibrant purple, especially in the video, like as I'm taking the video, I'm like, holy man, that really pops.

So anyways, I appreciate you doing this. You're welcome. Thank you very much.