Günther Wagner

It makes Rowe shudder. For an ex-miner, a find like this is what it's all about. It's the jackpot. And it is surely one of the most beautiful things Mother Nature has ever created. I want one. Tomorrow, I'm told, I will go "noodling" - the term used when average Joes go out and try to find discarded opal that the miners might have overlooked (as if) - for my own.

I SPENT THE NEXT MORNING with Günther Wagner, a German transplant and ex-miner who now takes tourists out to noodle for opal. We head to a discarded opal mine and I quickly learn how difficult it is to find this stuff, mainly because there are so many rocks and minerals - most noticeably gypsum - in the ground in Coober Pedy that look like opal to an untrained eye.

Gypsum is a rock-forming mineral that's white in color (like opal can be) and is nearly everywhere in a sedimentary environment like Coober Pedy. When the sun hits it, it gives off a commanding shine that grabs your attention and tricks you into thinking you've struck it rich. Unfortunately,­ gypsum is worthless unless you're in the plaster business (it's a major ingredient of the stuff), which I'm clearly not.

Eventually my eyes do make the appropriate gypsum-filtering adjustments, allowing me to not pick up every shiny piece of rock I see. And once they do, finding the opal is a little easier than I expected. I uncover several minuscule pieces of light opal, and even some with a few small rays of color.­ From what little I know, though, I can tell it's nothing to get excited about, and I half wonder if it wasn't planted here to give tourists a tingly feeling inside when they find it. Wagner assures me it's not, but he concurs that it's more a token piece of opal than anything that will allow me to relocate to the Tuscan countryside anytime soon.