Published in the July 5, 2013 issue of the Bainbridge Island Review.

Islander Houston Wade is a gemstone hunter and, by default, an adventurer.

He has visited countless ghost towns, had guns waved in his face, been mistaken for a cattle thief in the night, had his underfooting on the side of a desert cliff give way while hauling $10,000 worth of equipment up its steep face, and has driven off a bluff into Class 3 rapids.

And after all that, he’s lived to tell the tales.

It’s no wonder that two years ago when a friend told Wade to submit his gemstone hunting adventures to Mike Rowe’s reality show, “Dirty Jobs,” a seed was planted.

It was a comment that inspired a whole pot of possibilities for Wade, who recently launched a Kickstarter to transform this more-than-a-hobby into what has the potential to become a Discovery Channel-esque TV show.

“My goal is to demonstrate that people have an innate curiosity,” Wade said. “And if you give them smart TV they’ll feel something from it.”

When Wade graduated from the University of Hawaii at Hilo in 2006 with degrees in geology, geography and astrophysics, he envisioned himself continuing on to the University of Washington for graduate school in astronomy, as if he didn’t have enough academia under his belt already.

Instead, not a whole year out of college, Wade realized that, though he understood the science of rocks from his studies, he had never actually gone out and found something.

At the time he didn’t foresee that this raw curiosity would later have him traveling around the country pulling precious gemstones from canyons, desert sand and mine shafts deep underground.

He started small. He took a gold sifting pan and went to the creek located next door to That’s-A-Some Pizza.

And bam! His pan picked up glacier gold dust that had found its way down from Canada. It was just that easy.

Sure, the dust didn’t have much worth, but he was hooked.

“Life takes you on these journeys,” Wade said. “This wasn’t even my hobby at all.”

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