Montana Gems of Philipsburg, Philipsburg

We had a great time looking through the bag of rock for sapphires. My grandson found several nice specimens, 2 of which we had cut and polished. We were there in March and the weather was cool, but we enjoyed the time spent looking for gems! .

Wonderful people, whom I have yet to personally meet. I have , for a number of years, purchased from and talked to these folks on -line and on the phone, and always, yes, always they have been nice and prompt with their answers and corrections. Only once have I had an issue with an order and that was due to me placing such right at their busiest time of year. My order was missed, but once I contacted them and they looked into the issue I had a package the next day, wonderful! The product sent is true to description and never short. Always, knock on wood, finds are made in the mine gravel ordered. They are a fair and nice outfit to work with.

I love this place. Every time we have family in town we go here to mine the sapphires. It’s a small family owned business and you can tell they really care about their customers. We have found some amazing gems here too but the experience is fun even if there isn’t a good find!

Most fun ever on a nice summer day. Everyone loved finding their own sapphire. We collected about 56 total. Beautiful. What a treasure in your own backyard.

My husband and I visited this amazing little treasure trove in September 2017. The set up is fairly straightforward. The shop, the gravel room, (bags of gem filled gravel) and the outside area where you wash and sort the gravel looking for the gems. We had a very entertaining afternoon as we searched for sapphires from our selected bag of gravel. We were assured there would be sapphires to find, and then the hunt was on! The staff we met were very friendly and helpful, spending time with us as we learned what to look for and even inspected our reject pile of gravel.. subsequently finding several sapphires that we had missed (the technique is a little more tricky than you'd think!). We ended up with about a dozen uncut sapphires with five of those being excellent unflawed "cutable" quality. We were thrilled! And immediately decided to have those sapphires cut and polished. The stunning results were mailed to us about three months later and now our granddaughters are wearing beautiful earrings created from the sapphires we found on our trip. Our entire experience at Montana Gems of Philipsburg was really great. We would be glad to go again and recommend that you go too!