Gemtree
About 140kms north of Alice Springs is Gemtree where we stayed for 2 nights so we could go fossicking. Gemtree’s a real bush park and the facilities are very good. They run fossicking tag along tours where you follow a driver out to the gemfields, they give you all the tools (sieves, water etc), show you how to do it and what you should be looking for, and they leave you to it. You can choose to do either a garnet or a zircon tour. We’ve already fossicked for zircons so chose the garnet tour. We spent about 6 hours fossicking and ended up with about 17/18 usable garnets (ones that can be cut and set as earrings, necklaces etc) and a bunch of others that are too small or flawed to use in settings. There were plenty of people there with us and we were all checking out what each other had found when we heard shouts of discovery. We also ended up with sunburn, sore backs and sore legs, but we had a lot of fun.
