Australian opal miner Rod Griffin dropped in The Arkenstone Gallery to deliver our newest acquisition, a giant 50pound boulder opal that he carefully split into a dozen or so pieces to reveal the rich, blue and green opal hidden within this "normal" looking rock.

M: All right guys, so Rob picked this Opal up at AGTA in Tucson this year and we're getting it delivered and we're getting a little bit of history on how this thing was broken up.

Rod: Okay, my name is Rod Griffin. I'm very good with a hammer and I'm very good miner. Okay, I've been doing this since I was five years old and I'm now 78. And this particular boulder came from southwest Queensland in Australia and it's quite a remarkable boulder for the context that it's a complete boulder and it hasn't been broken up to be cut to stones. Now you might think why would I pick this up off the ground?

Rob: I think why would I buy this from you? Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.

Rod: And I think well you can always have your money back. I've got the checkbook in my pocket.

Rob: Yeah. Okay. So Rod generously agreed to fully prep it.

Rod: There it is.

Rob: We'll just get that gone. He agreed to fully prep this so that we can make this a display piece. Show us what you did.

Rod: Well, we sliced it here and left this hole. Then I decided to, if you were going to make it into stones, you would have cut the top off and looked down inside and seen where all the lines were. Okay, but in this case I didn't have that possibility. So I took one piece at a time, studied it and then I have now opened it up to make it into a beautiful piece. And this is also another beautiful piece.

Okay, and it just opens itself up to be the most magnificent boulder that I've had for a long time. So when it falls apart like this and this particular piece is magic and now when you look at this piece and you look on top of it you think nothing but then you turn it around look at this stone here. Look at the piece, look at the color there. To me it takes my breath away because purple blue is the Australian and also American color. So this piece came off right here. Yeah. I'm just gonna move that out of the way. But if you'd like to just look at this piece here in the light, you see that color in there.

This is what Rob saw in Tucson and he thought from that it's worth trusting you to see what else is here.

Rob: I certainly would not trust myself to know where to go. So you're telling me you saw lines, mystic lines that only you saw in this and you could get the color out along them.

Rod: Yeah. See he knows where to get that broken in half so that it turns into that. If I did it right I would chop it in pieces.

Rod: You see this piece here. See this piece here. There's more under there. There's a color that goes through there and that could I could there could be a decent nodule in there if we wanted to break it again. This goes through and goes into this blue color there okay you can see the blue line see this see that but I could hit that and break that for you in front of the TV here. If you wanted me to. I've got my hammer in the car. And then we'd have jewelry we wouldn't have a museum display. This piece here shows you how beautiful it could be going through here coming out to this blue color here. I see a touch there. There's the blue there. Wow. But it takes my breath away. And I've been in the business a long time. Look at that color. Yeah this is the largest complete boulder I've ever seen.