Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Today we went on a bus to the El Dorado Gold Mines headed by an old couple, Yanda Yukon and her husband. We rode through a permafrost tunnel on a narrow gauge coal mining train to the gold mine. There is still permafrost here, but when they are inside the tunnel is really wide. They still had the old mining machines that were used in the 1930s.
The process is to dig up the rocks and gravel inside the tunnel, put it in cars to bring it out of the tunnels and dump it in a huge pile. Once it warms up and the streams has thawed out, they dump car loads of the dirt into a bin and rinse it with the stream water. It comes out the bottom and flows along a sluice line. We were sitting along this line and she showed us some of the nuggets they have found in there. The largest nugget was maybe 9 ounces; but it was much heavier than it looked.
They gave each of us a sack of dirt to learn how to pan for gold. You pour water on top of it and swirl it around to loosen the dirt and pour it off. There is a technique of doing this so you swirl the rocks, dirt and water around and then pour off from the edge. It looked to me as if I was probably dumping out my gold too. You never know. They may go back and check all that spilled out water later and find the gold we really found for them. Who knows? Anyway, Daddy needed 2 bags of dirt because he only got 4 flakes from all of that work. I was given 1 bag and Daddy helped me swirl it because I didn't want to dump out any dirt for fear of throwing away the " baby with the bath water"! Daddy found a lot of gold flakes in mine; so we combined them and we able to put them into a special locket for me to wear the gold as a necklace. The gold supposedly was valued at $22. One young guy had $40 worth. I know it has to be a racket, but it was really fun and Daddy really enjoyed it. It was the most realistic, especially when you have to swat at mosquitoes!!!
The sky looked really odd tonight. Eventually, it rained cats and dogs and hailed! It is actually darker than it has been in a while because of the rain. We were going to eat at the Salmon Bake Buffet. It was $62 a person and outside. Not a good idea. How do you keep your food from getting wet? We leave tomorrow for Denali National Park We need to get a new windshield wiper blade for the RV before we leave. We are also considering buying a canoe to go fishing . It could fit on the roof of the CRV for the trip home.