Rock solid: Columbia Falls couple still digging up precious stones

When Jan Graham was a child, her father worked for the National Park Service and the family traveled a lot as her father’s job took her from park to park.

Along the way she started to collect rocks and stones. Some she picked up. Some her father gave her. It started out with a cigar box, and then a shoe box, and finally, her father gave her a trunk full of interesting, unique and sometimes precious stones.


“I was always into rocks,” she said.

Jan spent her early childhood in the desert parks of the Southwest, but in 1969 her father took a job as maintenance supervisor for Glacier National Park.

Montana became Jan’s permanent home. She met Murry Graham, another rock enthusiast. They hit it off, got married, had two girls and decided to start a rock shop and gift store in Hungry Horse — the Rocky Mountain Nature Co. and Glacier Fly Shop (they also love to fish) — in 1990.

The shop would be a summer business for retirement income. Jan worked for the Columbia Falls School District, so it fit the plan.

“We knew the tourist industry wasn’t going to go away,” she said.

They met a goldsmith who lived in Hungry Horse at the time and started selling her jewelry and sapphires on commission.

“As soon as we figured out [people wanted] sapphires … business took off,” Murry recalled.

Sapphires are a made-in-Montana stone. Yogo sapphires are the most coveted. Once polished, they’re a beautiful blue, with no “zonation,” meaning the color is uniform throughout. They can be nearly as hard, or as hard as diamonds.

The goldsmith would leave Hungry Horse, but the Grahams kept selling the stones and the rings and jewelry they adored. It became more and more difficult to find them, however. So about 19 years ago, the couple paid $10,000 for a lot near Utica that included two sapphire claims.

Murry started digging with a pick and shovel. Jan hauled up pails of dirt from the hole. The kids helped and eventually, so did the grandkids.

They spent weekends and vacations at the claim. They’d work all season for a handful of sapphires. It was hard, but rewarding work. A hunk of nondescript rock might hold a precious stone the size of an infant’s pinky nail. Once polished and cut, it transforms into a thing of beauty.

They ran the shop in Hungry Horse until 2018, and had a shop in Bigfork as well. They sold them both and built a new store, the Sapphire Shoppe, in Columbia Falls on U.S. 2 that opened last year.

“It’s been better than Bigfork and Hungry Horse put together,” Murry said.

THE SHOP isn’t just sapphires; it also features fine art photos from John Ashley and a host of other Montana stones, including Montana agates that Murry polishes and forms on his own into bear claws and other jewelry. The patterns in the stone, which is native to the Yellowstone River, looks like claws in the rock.

Murry also carries a unique stone in his pocket, called a Buffalo stone, because it looks like a buffalo bone.

“Legend says if you have one in your pocket you’ll never go hungry,” he said.

The stone is actually Baculite, a fossil from an ancient cephalopod, a shellfish with a long straight body. The critters roamed underwater about 100 million years ago. The fossils look like buffalo bones, Murry pointed out.

Today the Grahams have the Columbia Falls shop up for sale as well, more of a test of real estate waters than anything, they note.

They still plan on mining stones come next spring and the shop this month is open by appointment and will be open Dec. 17-23. They’ll then head south and reopen in the spring, they said.

Rocks are a lifelong hobby and for them, a genuine labor of love.

“It’s really cool for the kids to get into,” Jan explained. “It goes their whole life.”

On one dig, Murry told his grandkids they could have whatever they found and dug up themselves that day.

“They found an $8,000 stone,” he said with a smile.

It was made into a ring for a family member.