Dells Mining Company

I guess I must be the only person that just was not into this place. You buy a bucket which starts at about 35 going all the way up to roughly 130. The bucket has a certain amount of stones in it already. You essentially dumped the sand into a screen filter and wash it all out. After you wash it out you take it inside they tell you what you have and try to sell you jewelry based on the gems you found. Don’t expect anything high grade, but if you have kids and 50 bucks to kill and it seems like fun go for it.

Dells Mining Co. was the highlight of our vacation for our 10-​year-​old. And the smile on his face each time another beautiful stone appeared from the dirt made it the highlight for me too. Well worth the money. Best advice is to go in knowing which bucket you want and whether or not you want to have any of your stones cut and set into jewelry. We passed on the jewelry this time, but after seeing the quality we may go for it next time. I went in expecting to find a couple of small stones in the $ 30 bucket, but we left with a bag full of emeralds, topaz, rose quartz, clear quartz, rubies, tiger’s eye and more. Great value and great fun. Do it.

I have seen this place for as many years as I’ve been going to the Dells and decided to stop by today. I was impressed with how professional this place is. Buckets range from $ 15-​about $ 160. You definitely get your money’s worth! Just to name a few that we got in the $ 30 bucket are: Ruby, topaz, rose quartz, and emerald. The service here was great! The staff are really friendly and highly knowledgable of gems. This is now going to be a must stop place for me every time I go to the Dells.

Great experience for the kids. You got to choose a bucket by price and there are at least 5 different colors by price to choose from. After we finished digging for stones they explained every different one to us. The kids loved it and it was fun for the adults as well. The staff was extremely helpful and informative. Great fun day.

My kids, 3 and 5, loved this. We bought the $ 30 bucket and got nice sized gems that my daughter is really excited about. Staff was slow and generally not attentive. overall it was a good experience.

Kids had a blast mining for gems. While we all know mining for gems in Wisconsin isn’t real the buckets filled with straight up sand made it a bit over the top. Personally I’d rather have a more realistic experience where I’m going through real aggregate rather than an engineered experience as this was.
I thought the buckets were a bit overpriced but we did get quite a few gems. The salespeople were very friendly and I didn’t find them to be pushy at all. Definitely an experience we all enjoyed and reasonably priced entertainment.

The kiddos love this place-​it is a fun way to spend a hour in the dells. To get your gems set and cut it is pricey but if your kids are like mine they will be perfectly happy with a bag of shiny rocks.

I’ve been going here since I was a kid, probably 20 years or so. Of course, the prices have gone up over the years but they don’t seem outrageous. The really pricey buckets have more valuable cut stones in them already, so don’t get sticker shock, there’s plenty of uncut stones in the cheap buckets too.
Going through the buckets doesn’t take very long since the «dirt» is very sandy and washes away easily. Still great if you have kids who like getting dirty, though. I ruined many t-​shirts this way when I was a kid!
I did this so many times when I was a kid that I learned how to identify my own stones pretty well. It’s always fun to see if you’re correct when they go through the gems when you’re finished.
I often got jewelry and at least in the past, it’s been great quality that I’m still enjoying and wearing. This isn’t throwaway stuff, so the prices reflect that. Gem cutting is priced per carat. The less valuable stones will have lower prices. Amethyst used to be something like $ 30/​carat, for example, while rubies and emeralds were much higher, like $ 90/​carat (these were what I remember from years ago). The employees will estimate about how many carats you’ll be able to get out of a stone and then you can browse settings. They then ship your particular stone to the gemologists and jewelers who cut and set it for you, then ship it to you.
We’ve ordered at least 10 pieces of jewelry and have never experienced a problem. In fact, in one opal pendant setting, the jeweler was concerned that the opal may come loose because of the particular shape and style of the pendant, so they added a small bridge of extra gold to hold it securely. The piece in the showroom didn’t include this, and since we had already paid, there was no extra charge for it. Off the top of my head, jewelry we’ve gotten includes: opal pendant, fire opal pendant, 2 iolite rings, iolite earrings, mystic (heat-​treated) topaz ring and pendant. We’ve been happy with all of it.
Even if you don’t plan to buy any jewelry, it’s fun. Play in the dirt. Learn about gems and stones. Have fun.

This was a good time for me and my 2 girls. We purchased a yellow and red bucket and they got a lot of gems out of both. When we were done they told the girls about each gem. We picked 2 gems and had them cut and necklaces made for each of them. Total for the 2 cuts and chains was around 130. We had fun And got a nice special keep sake out of it for our memories. Total time we spent there was close to 2 hours. Total cost was about 180. It was one of those things I didn’t mind spending the money on because of the family time we had doing something hands on.

Fun kid activity. The staff is pushy to try to get you to spend a lot of money, but dont buy it. Go with the cheap $ 15 bucket and let the kids enjoy playing in the dirt.

The Dells Mining Company is the reason that I went to the Dells. I watched a show on the Travel Channel about mines that sell buckets that you can sort through to find gems. It looked like fun.
I believe that this company buys the buckets of sand and gems from somewhere in South Carolina. You have four options in the price of the buckets, starting at $ 15 and going up to $ 120. You pour the sand into a sifter, place it in the running water trough and look through to find gems. All of the buckets are guaranteed to have a cut gem in a plastic bag inside.
It was fun. When you finish sorting you take your goodies inside and someone tells you what you’ve found. I had a fist-​sized rose quartz that is lovely. What wasn’t clear was (OMG!) how much it costs to have your gems cut. I had a gigantic garnet in my stash and asked how much it would cost. Um, $ 650. Nope, not gonna happen in this lifetime. I don’t know tons about gems or cuts, but it seems that there is no telling what kind of quality it would be if I did decide to cut it. Then you’d have to pay for the gold setting on top of that.
In the end, I decided to have the pre-​cut topaz (the one from the bucket in a plastic baggie) set into a pendant. I was already in for $ 60 for the bucket, so why not? I paid $ 120 for that.
A sucker is born every minute. That day I was definitely a sucker, but I had fun.