Recently in Gold hunting Category

It's probably more than a little ironic that in my search for Colorado gold, the more fool's gold I find poking through the tailings piles, the more I conclude that I'm on the right path. Hopefully this is not a metaphor for my life.

Some consider the goal of writing for a living (particularly fiction) to be similarly misguided. And I won't deny that to date it's still fool's gold for me too--but shiny, wonderful fool's gold nonetheless...

The blog is a good outlet and I have neglected it recently in pursuit of that other gold, but I wanted to take a minute to explain myself. Last month, 75% of my traffic to the blog came from direct addresses--so, many thanks to those of you who bookmarked me and keep coming back for more of this rambling. I'm down 10% in that category now, probably because I dropped the blog like a hot potato 10 days ago and haven't posted a new entry since. There are a couple of reasons for this, and you can expect the pattern to continue for a little while--possibly for a long while until the wild edible plants start poking up their spring shoots.

Gregg and I visited the Phoenix Gold Mine in Idaho Springs, Colorado, on my birthday a few days ago at the suggestion of a friend. For $10 you can get a guided tour of the mine and for another $5 you can do all the gold panning you want. The Phoenix Mine is the destination of many a student school group, although we were fortunate to hit it right after the latest gaggle of young'n's had departed. It's beautiful country up there. We brought a picnic lunch and made a day of it.

It's a new day and I'm starting a new blog category--one I have been planning for a while, actually. It's gold hunting!

Ever since I moved to Fairplay, Colorado last November, I have been interested in finding gold. I mean, we're not far from where they found Tom's Baby, the 13 lb gold nugget, back in the gold fever days. So after I got here I dragged Gregg across every tailings pile we could find, looking for treasure. The search has definitely been one of learning by trial and error. Much of the information I've gleaned to date has been from piecing together obscure pieces of information as they come my way.

For example, I've read up on gold in every ancient gold hunting book I found in the house, and these are replete with antiquated and flavorful stories--like how to separate gold from other metals by hollowing out a cavity for it in a potato and baking it together with mercury to cause the gold to conglomerate. (Right, so we modern people don't do it that way anymore because of the whole mercury poisoning thing.) And then, if you have a particularly pesky mother-in-law, the same book states, you can feed her the mercury potato. (Again, do NOT try this at home.) It's a good thing for Gregg's mom, I guess, that he and I are not married!