Although the Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch team found significant iridium deposits all the way back in the first season, there are still many other mysteries to solve.
If you have been watching Duane and Chad Ollinger and the rest of the Mystery at Blind Frog ranch team explore and investigate their 160-acre family property out in Utah, ever since the show started airing back in 2021, you may already know that each new discovery on the ranch usually just leads to more questions.
And unfortunately, it seems like this was exactly the case that the team happened upon in the first season of the show.
How the Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch team found the iridium
In this “Answers” episode, Duane, Chad and the rest of the team decide to try and locate the cave that should be just beneath the unmarked fault-zone.
However, after struggling to get their equipment to work correctly and multiple failed drills, Chad ultimately comes up with a plan to scrape the sides of the drilled hole at the energy-zone to figure out if this would yield better results.
And to everyone’s surprise, their jerry-rigged scraper revealed “blue dirt” caused by the fragments of iridium deposits found just beneath the surface of the ground rock.
Of course, it did not take long for Eric to scurry all over the ranch in search of other iridium deposits.
Regrettably, most of these efforts proved to be in vain, but their tests with the XRF gun on the sample from the energy-zone gave a reading of 804,000 parts per million, which proved that the team had found specs of pure iridium on the property.
And considering iridium’s high value, it turns out that the real Blind Frog Ranch treasure may have been part of the ground (and not in it) all along.
Iridium’s high value
While the team might have had their hearts set on finding gold, iridium is not only heavier than gold, but it is also more valuable.
In fact, at the time that this episode was shot, iridium was worth almost double the value of gold , and over 100 times what silver was worth, as follows:
| Metal | Worth |
| Silver | $25 per ounce |
| Gold | $1900 per ounce |
| Iridium | $3000 per ounce |
By March of 2022, iridium’s price had increased even more to an average of about $4900 per troy ounce.
Why iridium has such a high value
In the series, Eric Drummond (the team’s resident geologist) explains that iridium is much more plentiful in outer-space than it is on earth. He claims that this metal is often found where meteorites have made contact with the earth.
But iridium’s worth is not only derived from its scarcity, but also from the fact that it has such a high melting point, which makes it incredibly useful.
Particularly, in the production of things like industrial appliances, spark plugs, crucibles, LED displays and several kinds of scientific equipment.
Why the Blind Frog Ranch team has not set up an iridium mine yet
Though the theory that Blind Frog Ranch’s treasure lies in its iridium deposits rather than in actual hidden treasure or gold is certainly compelling, there is a reason why Duane, Chad and the rest of the team have not switched their titles from treasure hunters to iridium miners just yet.
As longtime Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch fans may know, there are still many other unexplained mysteries about the property that the team has not yet figured out.
Not to mention the fact that setting up a mining operation will be a costly endeavor, and the team still does not know where the biggest deposit of iridium on the property is located.
What the team found inside the Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch box
While Duane, Chad and the rest of the team may not have located their biggest mineable iridium deposit just yet, the mysteries at Blind Frog Ranch just never seem to stop emerging.
And this includes the mysterious submerged box that the team has been trying to unearth since the first season of the series.
This box’s contents, which was so heavy and fragile that it ended up almost tearing apart when the team tried to drag it to shore in season two, still remains a mystery.
But Chad was able to recover some of the strangely misplaced rocks around it. And after some extensive testing, the team found that these rocks contain yet another strange metal called gallium.
However, they still have not figured out why this gallium would have been poured into these rocks or when or how this could have happened before the rocks were placed on top of the equally-mysterious box.
