The thin air at 12,500 feet is working everybody’s lungs hard, but Brian Busse is at ease, patiently dragging a garden tool through loose gravel. He’s looking for the blue glassy sparkle of aquamarine, Colorado’s official state gemstone, a coveted relative of emeralds in the beryl family of minerals.

And there it is, an aquamarine the size of a pebble. Busse picks it up, rolls the gemstone between his fingers, one eye squinting as he holds it up to the sun. He figures he can fashion it into earrings that will pay for dinner, or at a least “a side of fries at McDonalds.”

He pockets it and continues digging, the gravel he’s pushed aside tumbling down a 45-degree slope. No need for heavy machinery and dynamite up here; gravity clears away the degraded granite from his hand-dug quarry on the steep side of Mount Antero near Salida.

Busse, a self-described “gem tracker” and former star of the Weather Channel TV show Prospectors, calls his claim the Thank You Lord Aquamarine Mine, for reasons of faith and family.

“I’m thankful for the beautiful stones and a beautiful place to work with my family,” Busse said. “The Lord allowed me to do that job safely, without too many injuries.”

Busse and his wife, Yolanda, raised their six children on the mountainside, camping and homeschooling there for days at a time, some years for as much as 100 days. Sales of the gems they found provided for them the six months out of the year they were off the mountain and in Salida.

No one in the mountain community seemed to take notice or express alarm that six young children lived half the year above civilization. No one up there wanted anyone else to tell them what to do, and even if they offered advice, Busse says he wouldn’t have listened anyway. He wanted to make a living in Colorado nature, enough to provide for his family for “a long, long time.”

The family took truckloads of supplies to the basecamp, sought shelter and slept in a giant teepee made of tarps, and took showers in solar heated water drawn from Baldwin Creek. Now that they’re grown, five of the six Busse children still mine and sell aquamarine and other gems.

Approaching Medicare age, Busse struggles with the lingering pains of his injuries. He has separated his sternum and both shoulders, and once snapped his Achilles tendon – 15 injuries in all, but no broken bones. The lingering pain doesn’t slow him down. There’s too much left to do. He estimates that he’s worked only 1 acre of his 20-acre claim, and that many billions of dollars of gems remain to be unearthed and sold.

As is well known to viewers of the Prospectors TV series, which ran for four seasons in the 2010s, Busse looks and sounds like an old-time gem prospector – bearded, weathered, straight-talking. You almost expect him to do a jig, kicking his legs, a jug of moonshine on his elbow, and the mountains echoing his holler at every new discovery. That’s not his speed today. He’s the tortoise, not the hare.

The Weather Channel had heard about Busse from other gem prospectors but had not yet committed to airing the program. They wanted to film Busse at the base of Mount Antero. The morning after the filming, the channel called to say it wanted him on the show, and that because of his on-camera performance, the show would proceed.

Busse quit after four seasons, and the show was canceled. “I was open-hearted and open-minded,” but television “affected every relationship I had with everybody I knew – the good, bad and ugly. Everyone, all my friends on the show, were in competition with me for that lead role.”

He is now trying to sell his own show to Hollywood, spending time in Malibu reaching out to entertainment industry executives and selling his Colorado jewelry.

Busse fell in love with the Colorado wilderness when he caught his first rainbow trout as a child on a visit with his uncle at Red Feather Lakes near Fort Collins. He grew up in Iowa, where an illness kept him out of school for a year. He spent that year hunting, fishing and playing in the hardwood forest. The solitude of that year prepared him for Antero.

He works his claim methodically and almost daily. It supplies him a steady income, but with the thought that a bigger payday might come. “You might be able to find a stone that’s a month’s or a year’s salary, or maybe something that you could retire on,” Busse said, matter-of-factly.

Others who want a quick buck come and go, or try to steal their way to riches. Busse says thieves – friends of his children – took two stones from Thank You Lord worth $1 million. He reported the crime to the FBI and Colorado Bureau of Investigation, but he never recovered the gems. He doesn’t dwell on it.

“Revenge is God’s, not mine,” he said. “It’s better for me to focus on finding the next stone than worrying about the stones that were stolen from me.” Even so, the more time he spends on the mountain, the less likely thieves will take their chances.

Busse’s aquamarine mine is on a shoulder of Mount Antero, its 14,269-foot summit accessible by four-wheel drive. Low clearance vehicles should steer clear. County Road 277 rises from near Mount Princeton Hot Springs Resort and crosses Baldwin Creek several times on the way to his base camp. The creek runs several feet high after a rain or spring runoff; 277 meets County Road 278, which stops short of the Antero summit.

He drives his guests in a black “Darth Vader” Jeep Rubicon, modified by Rocky Mountain Jeep Rentals in Salida with a 6.5-inch lift bar for greater steering control. That helps with traction on the road’s large boulders. Busse takes it slow, but even at 3 mph, the passengers rock from side to side for the next hour.

As he drives, Busse eases the rough ride by explaining the road’s origin, the gemstones market, and his claim’s standing in the world. The U.S. government built the road to access beryllium, the rare metal that is useful in space programs and nuclear weapons. The world’s leading producers of aquamarine include Brazil and Pakistan, and lately, Vietnam. Busse’s gem field is third highest in the world, just below gem fields in the Himalayas of Tibet and the Andes of South America.

Once parked at his basecamp at 11,400 feet, Busse invites guests to start the hike up to his claim. On the 45-degree slope above tree line, he installed a nylon rope that climbers can grip as they struggle to gain secure footing in the loose, rocky talus.

At Busse’s worksite, between 12,000 and 13,000 feet, is a sweeping view of the Sawatch Range above Salida and Buena Vista. The basecamp below looks like the bottom of a great amphitheater, surrounded on all sides by 13er and 14er peaks. On this summer day, the sky is clear, no clouds on the horizon.

Busse remembers days when lightning strikes and thunder would cause avalanches. On one especially loud day, the amphitheater amplified the noise of 100 lightning strikes, followed by ball lightning, “which slowly moved through the trees, and blew up, BOOM!, right in a puddle full of mosquito larvae and dried it out,” he said. “We were all deaf for a minute.”

He sometimes intervenes to help others in trouble on Antero – helping drivers who roll their Jeeps and stopping bad guys who threaten others with guns and knives. He recalls four or five weapons encounters, each of which he de-escalated.

“I got in their faces and disarmed them, sometimes with force,” Busse said. “I was going to hurt them before they hurt somebody else. Most were smart enough to understand me and back off.”

Before mining on Antero, Busse displayed his fearlessness as a lead bouncer at a bar in Fort Collins.

There are no knives, guns, rolled Jeeps or mosquitos at the worksite this day. No ball lightning either. The amphitheater is quiet. Busse is seated, his legs sprawling over his lode. Guests from Austin lie above him on their bellies, scratching for their aquamarine lottery ticket. They find something less than the thieves stumbled upon, but they’re content.

“One of the pleasures of working in God’s country is that, for some people, it becomes a place where they can step back from society, let go, start to heal,” Busse said. He knows something about wilderness, and healing.

Busse will keep going up, despite the greed of Hollywood, the aches and pain of his injuries, and the hard work that taxes his heart, mind and soul. Mining is what he calls a “poor man’s life insurance” for his family’s financial future, but what gets him up the mountain is the fun he has with the people he cares about. “That’s the most important thing,” he said.