I grew up going on opal fossicking holidays as a kid - Coober Pedy, Mintabie, White Cliffs, Lightning Ridge, etc. We'd camp somewhere and then spend the days di

I grew up going on opal fossicking holidays as a kid - Coober Pedy, Mintabie, White Cliffs, Lightning Ridge, etc. We'd camp somewhere and then spend the days digging around getting filthy and finding opal, which was great fun. My maternal uncle was an opal dealer at one point in life and both he and my paternal grandfather had opal cutting/polishing setups in their sheds at some point. My dad did a work placement up there for a few months, renting an underground place. Beside the curiosity of underground living, Coober Pedy is a grim place. Hot, dry, dirty. You couldn't pay me to live there. There's a lot of cheap accommodation on real estate sites as a result. I passed through last year on an outback trip, and stopped there for my kids to dig around. Way back, there were countless places you could "go noodling" (fossicking) but best bet last time seemed to be Jewellers Shop Road: https://goo.gl/maps/3thJiKfzY1YQaxkY6 https://goo.gl/maps/3thJiKfzY1YQaxkY6 It's picked pretty clean, but we found a few chips (small pieces) with colour (as opposed to less valuable forms like "potch") - you just have to be patient and have fairly focused kids! Not sure how active the surrounding area is these days. Mostly seems to be idle blowers (vac-based machines that bring material up from shafts) and mullock heaps. I think the heavy action has progressively moved up to other opal fields a few miles out of town. The story I always liked was about opal showing up under UV lighting. They'd rip up material from shafts with blowers and pass it along a conveyor belt for pickers to watch with UV lights and grab at opal as it went by. Only issue was that scorpions also glowed... You can see prospectors talking about using this method here: https://www.prospectingaustralia.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?id=18030 https://www.prospectingaustralia.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?... Probably my favourite memory was a place called Grasshopper in Mintabie. The operators would blast in an open cut mine with dynamite, and then huge grading machines would drag the leftover scraps up to an area they let the public pick over looking for smaller pieces of opal. We were like birds showing up on a lawn after it's been mown. Another spot was Concrete/Cement Hill. My little brother (5yo at the time?) had become bored finding nothing and decided to make a cave house for a caterpillar he'd found. While the rest of us toiled with heavy tools, he mucked around with this bloody caterpillar, and found two pieces of opal worth $500-1000 in the process...