Spring Time at the Gold Mine

Spring has finally come to the Mid Atlantic. Spring's timing worked out perfectly for a long anticipated trip my prospecting club had been planning for a number of months now. Anna was more than ready for the task.

About 20 of us headed South to Thermal City Gold Mine in Western North Carolina. I was astounded by the great turn out we had. Considering half of our active members made the 1000 mile round trip journey, 20 is a great turn out. 

Our first full day, Friday, turned out to be a rainy one. Almost all of us went up to the panning troughs to try our luck. It takes a serious amount of luck to pull gold from the dirt they supply. In one pan there would be 4 or 5 nice sized flakes, getting everyone excited to keep panning. The next twenty pans would lead to not even a speck. Personally I found four specks out of 50+ pans. I didn't have the luck to pull out a pan from the pile where the gold had been put. Sorry, I know that sounds like I am saying the pile was salted. I feel it had been. All the gold found in the troughs was the exact same size. It was either a large flat tear drop or a very fine speck. I think the latter was native, but the flake gold was just too consistent in size and shape. When the gold was found, everyone got a new wind and kept on panning even though the inclination was to go drink a beer at the campsite or take a nap.

Ramero was in hog heaven, or maybe rockhound heaven. There are lots of rocks to look at. I was however only looking for the ones that glowed yellow.

Ramero was not the only rockhound there. Carrie and Ben took home a number of gems to add to their collection.

Anna made for a great base camp for three of us hearty miners. Breakfast was served from under her awning. Saturday night we had a cook out too.

Most of us were there to get some gold. William and Ben spent a good deal of their time running screened material through their sluice boxes. Both of them seemed to be grinning a great deal even though it was hard work.

Many of us ran the unscreened dirt through our high bankers. Overall, this material had the greatest yield for the dollar. The mine sells it by the scoop and dumps it for you on their beach where you can process it however you chose to. 

This photo was taken later in the day on Saturday after most people had cleared out already. At 9 am, the beach was elbow to elbow with hopeful miners. Everyone was hoping to find that one giant nugget the miners of the 1800's had left behind. This entire area had been worked heavily back then. Mining started here on a commercial scale before the 1849 California rush occurred. Lured by the stories of immense riches in California, most North Carolina miners dropped everything and headed West. 

Mike was hoping that he had a giant nugget in this high bank. Like everyone else he came very close to breaking even on the cost of dirt versus current gold values.

This is my take for the weekend. I know many of you are thinking it not all gold in the pan. Much of the gold recovered is coated in mercury. It escaped the amalgamation process back in the day and is now being collected back out. One of the greatest things about finding gold is that no one has ever seen it before. You are the very first one ever. However, in this case, you are the second person to see the gold. The first guy seeing it was only focused on the big stuff and he was sloppy enough to allow some to remain for us today. Gold is where you find it. Gold is also where others have found it before.

More Walks in the Woods (series)

Since it was a bright sunny day with a high near 50, I decided to take a walk in the woods. The naturalized daffodils sure think Spring is right around the corner even though the calendar says it is still  24 days away.

I seemed to find a lot of steps to no where in the woods today.

Everywhere is some where, but where these steps used to go is unknown to me.

Some of these stairs took a great deal of hand work to build. Shame they really go no where significant now a days.

Sometimes the stairs took a great amount of forming followed by a bunch of pouring. Now they preform no purpose at all. There is nothing at the top and they took you from nothing of any trace.

Sometimes the stairs lead to something charming.

Cast iron holds up well to the elements. The plaster and lathe on wood framing does not hold up quite as well.

The cross seamed oddly stripped of it's jewels. 

A seedy spirituality seemed to have creeped into this sanctuary. Maybe not, what do I know.

The marble had sure given up it's shine though.

And then there was the VW bus. It was where it just shouldn't have been. It was one of those "how did that get here" moments. 

It might have been left there by the Dharma Initiative. Nero might have donated it to the cause too.

It was like a fallen city in some parts of my walk.

Yet Another Walk in the Woods.

My sciatica has had me down for well over a month. The continuous pain has had me doing very little and has effected every aspect of my life. Thankfully the Chiropractic treatments I have been receiving in conjunction with physical therapy and electro therapy have me feeling a lot better. The pain, though constant and persistent has actually become tolerable. I decided I needed a long walk in the woods. It was a comfortable 28 degrees, so off I went, camera in hand. My favorite spot to "walk in the woods" is Patapsaco State Park. It is a narrow park running from Elkridge Maryland all the way up to Liberty Reservoir in Carroll County, 32 miles long, never more than a mile wide. Just like many parts of Appalachia, the long time inhabitants of the area were cleared out to make room for the park. I love to find their remnants of habitation.

I tend to find a lot of bed springs. They are always in really odd places.

They left behind a lot of their survival tools. At one time this probably was used to cut up the trees, thrown into the stove on a day just like this one. I have a chain saw. I can only imagine the effort it took to keep the house warm back then.

I just never know what I might find at these old homesites. I do not know when they began moving folks out, but from what I understand, most were gone by the early 1970's

The houses seem to all have been burned to the foundations and left to decay. At one time people lived here. Kids played, meals were shared, people lived their lives. Now trees grow though what was once a home.

One thing that I find a lot of is spring boxes. They are always left in tact. The entire homesite is gone, but the spring is left alone. 

I can only speculate this is or was a property marker. I was on the edge of the park when I found this human made anomaly.

I tend to find a lot of dams also. The entire Patapsaco River Valley was heavily industrialized from the 1770's on. There were many factories running off of the water power supplied by numerous containment ponds. Behind all these dams the space is completely filled in with silt and stone so instead of a dam, they are just waterfalls now.

   

There are hundreds of beautiful waterfalls in the park. This is the first step in the piedmont to the Appalachian Chain.

Did I mention it was only 28 degrees?

Knock, knock... Anyone home? Not for years now.

Yes, I drank from this spring. Very nice tasting water. Like I said, the springs at these homesites are for some reason left in tact.

I come across a lot of dumps. In the trunk of that car is a complete wood burning kitchen stove.

I love old dumps like this. I can spend hours looking through the debris. I really wanted to take that wood stove with me, but it is way too heavy and miles from a road.

I was really digging this crank. My first bike had that very same crank. I got it in 1973, when we lived in Atchison Kansas for a year.

When cars had real style...

My sovenier for the day. 6 foot long, enameled sign. I will be going back for the other side in the very near future.

A Golden Past Time

I got an email asking me what I have been doing this Winter while not Airstreaming. I think this was a subtle means of saying, "could you make a blog post?" Well, I actually have been very busy working and playing. Since most find wood cutting, wood splitting, wood hauling, and wood stacking boring, I will tell you about what I have been doing for fun. I have been finding the yeller stuff in our local streams and creeks.

Those out West look at these little piles and laugh, but we are finding gold where it really is not known to be found. It will take a bit of work to put together an ounce, but grams add up to an ounce eventually.

The creeks are nice and cold this time of year, so thick neoprene waders are must these days. Water proof gloves come in handy also.

The areas we are finding our best gold are spots that  most consider waste land. The little stream running behind an apartment complex and sandwiched next to a shopping mall, the stream running out of a settling pond connected to a shopping complex. The pace of development in our region is astounding, but they keep leaving little areas for us to play in. The digging and disrupting of the soil often pays off in spades for us.

I did a little map game the other day and found a crow could fly 10 miles from the White House to the spot where this sluice is separating the gold from the gravels. I find this a rather funny fact. 

Bloody Mary Morning

A bad day of fishing is better than just about anything. A mediocre day is even better. Fishing with some good friends on the Chesapeake Bay is about as good as it possibly can get. 

We left out of Solomons Island at 0' dawns early light. The sun was trying hard to poke it's head up over the horizon. It still had a good half hour or more before it was going to show itself.

The moon was full and it was trying hard to drop down below the horizon. It too had a solid half hour  to wait...

The umbrella rigs had no wait to speak of. 

By the time the sun cleared the horizon, we were fishing. 

And so began a spectacular day...

It was a day that just got better and better. The red solo cups were kept full throughout as the sun worked her way across the sky.

Our group is made up of repeat offenders on the Brawler. On this boat you do not go fishing, you go catching. All you out of state readers, make it an excuse to visit Maryland. Any of you in state readers who have never gone, I feel bad for you. 

That fish in John's hands is 41 inches long and weights 43 pounds. One filet will feed my family for four meals. Rockfish has the texture of lobster and the taste of crab. It is my favorite fish. Outside of the Chesapeake Bay this same fish is called a stripped bass. Here, we call them rock casually and rockfish formally. Everyone calls them good eating!

Who needs the Blue Angles when you are fishing right next to Patuxent Naval Air Station. All day long we watched all kind of jets zip by overhead. They practice a lot of touch and goes at Patuxent  NAS. A few F-117 stealth fighters buzzed by. What a weird looking plane. I sure hope it is worth $42.6 million dollars each. 

Back to catching. Dr Lou is up. Lou is one hell of a sportsman. If you ever go dove hunting with him, make sure you are far up field, because not much is getting past him...

... and very few fish get by him either. 39 inches long, 39 pounds. That fish is something to be proud of too. I wish I could show you more photos of fish brought into the boat, but we did not put any more into the box. We had a number of strikes during the day, but none of them resulted in a set hook. When you have a full moon, you have higher than normal tides know as a flood tide. With a tide that is super high, you have a very long period of time in which it is slack or the water does not move at all. During slack tide the rock do not feed at all. Unfortunately for us, the slack tide fell right into the later half of our trip. 

None the less, a mediocre day of fishing is better than just about anything going. This will be far from our last trip on the Brawler. Perhaps one of you out of staters will come visit and we can go. The season does end on the 15th of December. It opens again in April. We have a trip booked already for May.