Gold Fever!

Gold Fever struck on Saturday, February 20th of 2010. Suddenly we were thrust back to 1849 and the Gold Rush of the early California Settlers. The dog with us was no longer a companion, but a guard and a hunter, there to watch over us. The intricate Native American scroll work on the rocks we scrambled over were no longer hundreds of years old, but made just yesterday. My jeans and sneakers became a calico dress and work boots as I traversed through the woods just off the trail. The rock formations that had fallen long ago and retained their original squared shape were no longer ruins, but a standing cabin, waiting to be explored. I had stepped slowly off the path and back in time.


When I was only a child, my Uncle Mike taught me how to go Gold Panning. I will never forget that day. We went into the mountains of Toole (pronounced Tu-ill-a) in Utah, about an hour or so from where my Mom and Dad lived. It was near a copper mine, and a small stream ran down the mountainside by the road way. We found a good spot to pull off and my Uncle pulled out his gold panning supplies. I remember the smell of mud under my feet, the gravel crunching as I made my way down the path to the stream. We found a good spot to dig into the water and started putting small amounts of the silt into the gold panning bowl. He taught me how to swirl it around, looking for the tiny flecks. Nothing turned up for the longest time. Just about the moment we had decided to pick up and move to another spot, something caught my eye. There in the aluminum bowl, among the ridges and dirt, sat a shiny flake. It sat atop the dirt in the bottom, just below the surface of the water. I called to my Uncle, who came over expecting it to be a false alarm, like we had been coming across that day.


Much to my surprise, my Uncle practically jumped for joy. I had found gold, the real deal. He picked up the tiny flake with a pair of tweezers, filled a small glass vile with some of the creek water, and carefully let the gold piece go into the water. I watched as it swirled around in front of my eyes.


We took a break for lunch, which was my first experience with M.R.E.'s. They weren't as bad as I had been lead to believe, but they weren't that great either. My favorite was the crunchy freeze dried ice cream. Uncle Mike explained that it was Astronaut Food. My cousin Michael seemed to be used to the "astronaut food" since they often went camping and gold panning together.


After our meager meal, we went back to panning. Strangers walked past, curious as to what it was we were hunting for, none willing to ask. After a while, it was obvious that we weren't going to find anymore in that spot, so we cleaned up the gear and put it all away. Uncle Mike locked up the car and we decided to see if we could find the location the gold might have washed down from. That was when I learned about Sluice Trails.


As we hiked our way up a winding road that went towards the top of the nearest mountain, Uncle Mike pointed out the trails of rocks and debris that looked very much like a land slide that had nowhere to fall from. He explained to me that they were sluice trails, the rubble dug out of the mines and dumped down the hill when it was proclaimed that they had no value as a raw ore. They left pyramid shapes down the face of the mountain, looking like loose piles that rolled as far as the terrain would allow. At the top, almost always, was a mine that had been closed up long ago due to safety concerns.


The fence we came to didn't even slow us down. My uncle had been a smoker for many, many years. He huffed and puffed his way up behind Michael and myself, feeling the full weight of the altitude and humidity in his lungs. Finally we reached a clearing at the top of the mountain, where it opened out to the crest of the mountain. All around we could see wilderness, and off between two of the mountains on our west, Salt Lake City loomed in the distance. What brought us all to our full height and made the blood start pumping through our veins with the force of adrenaline was the timber lined entrance to an old Gold Mine.


Uncle Mike instantly forgot about the elevation and started to breath heavily, this time from excitement. He stood tall at six feet and almost 4 inches, and the mine was considerably smaller than that. He pulled a Mini-Mag from his back pocket and instructed us kids to wait where we were. This mine had not been closed like 90% of all others he had seen. Michael and I sat on the grass and waited. When Uncle Mike ducked his head and started to walk with bended knees with that tiny flash light in front of him, I asked Michael why we couldn't go in.


"Dad said that we should never go into something like that because there could be bears or wild cats inside. He said it could be easy to get lost in there too," he explained. My uncle was always a dare devil, but that didn't stop me from worrying about him. Those were possibilities I hadn't even thought of before that moment. On pins and needles I watched as the light in the back of the cave faded in the darkness, finally disappearing around a turn to the right. Uncle Mike was nowhere to be seen.


A good ten minutes passed and I started to get nervous. Finally that familiar weak beam of light from the Mini Mag became visible again and Uncle Mike emerged from the man made cave. He stood to his full height for a moment, stretching his back, leaning to and fro, getting things back where they needed to be. He didn't say anything for a long time. Finally, he turned off the flash light and put it back into his pocket.


"It was an old mine, but there's nothing left. Looks like nobodys been in there for years." He almost looked relieved. "I didn't go too far in. There were too many branches going off. Didn't want to get lost." Something inside told me that he had, indeed, gotten lost and that the relieved look on his face was due to the fact he was back in the sunlight once more. "Pitch black in there," he mumbled to himself. "Pitch, tar black."






As I stood just off of the trail looking at the base of what had once been a cabin in the woods while patting Muggsy the dog on the head, I talked with Sarah about which way we should go next. For some reason the image of my Uncle stretching out his back came to me. Like he did that day, I put one hand on my hip and leaned way over, cracking the bones on the right of my back in place before repeating that on the other side.

Sarah and I decided that we would follow Lou back towards the established trail. We walked past a tree with the exposed roots, I snapped a picture of the green glade with bare trees while Muggsy paused to sniff the air, and we stumbled upon a small section of the dry river bed where rocks sat under a felled tree at a cliff. We would have to walk the length of the tree to make it up the cliff, or walk the long way around. Always up for an adventure, we decided to try the climb. Muggsy ran ahead of us, bounded up the tree and leaped onto the grassy edge just beyond. He sat there panting, looking at us and wondering what was taking us so long.

I climbed down the edge towards the rocks in order to begin my climb and lost my footing. I feel on my hands and knees into the mud and silt at the base of one of the rocks on the down stream side. When I picked myself up to wipe the mud off of my hands, I froze. My hands glistened and shined like I had thrust them into a pile of glitter.

I gasped. Sarah thought I had hurt myself and rushed over to help. Muggsy ran down the tree and bounded towards me. Instantly I shot my hands up into the air to stop them both from treading on what I had found. There in the dirt before me, bright as the sun, tiny flecks of yellow stared up at my face.

I yelled loud enough for Lou to hear, and his head appeared over the cliff. As he looked down from the top, the disbelief was apparent on his face. Sarah, however, squealed with delight. We looked for a long time for a piece big enough to carry out with us, but I knew that there was no way we were going to find an actual nugget. It didn't stop me from looking though. Long moments passed where I rubbed the gold flakes into my hand, watching the soft metal blend with my skin.

"Come on, it's just Fools Gold" Lou said from above.

"Iron Pyrite is a hard stone, Lou. This is soft, malleable. There's no way this is fake. This is the real deal!" Excited, I continued to stare at the surface of the ground near my hand print for a long time. Finally, after a failed attempt to find something in which to store the precious substance, we gave up. We mentally marked the spot and reluctantly climbed to the tree. As we reached the end of the tree and started to scramble up the cliff side, Sarah turned to me.

"Look at this," she almost whispered, her eyes glowing as brightly as the gold we had discovered. She had set her hand into the dirt on the short cliff in order to find purchase and saw the entire hillside sparkling in among the dirt. She held up her hand to me to show that her hand now resembled mine, shining in the sun light with tiny golden flecks.

Sarah gouged out a hand hold in the hillside and balled up what she had removed into a large, smooth, round lump of earth. She tossed this up to Lou, who reluctantly caught it as gingerly as a little girl would grab a hold of a worm she had been asked to hold. The mud kept it's shape and we climbed the rest of the way up the hill.

Sarah was a trooper that day. She carried her mud ball prize all the way out of the mountain, a good two miles from where we had found it. Right now that mud ball rests inside a sandwich bag at my home, just waiting for me to "pan" the gold out of the earth and take it to a jeweler. I have no doubt in my mind that what we found that day was indeed gold. Separated and saved properly, that small lump of earth might be just enough to make a very nice necklace pendant in the shape of an "S" just for her, and that's just what I plan to do with it.

Yes, there is still gold in the California Mountains, if you're lucky enough to stumble across it.

Sioux City Sarsaparilla

While living on George Air Force Base in Victorville CA between 1988 and 1992 I made some of the greatest friends I'd ever known. I had a chance to grow up in one place for nearly six years and the stability was something I very much needed. I didn't realize that until many years later looking back on that time in my life. It was a heart breaker when I had to leave it all behind to move to Utah, but the years in California were vital at that time.

My sixth grade year was the best year I ever had in school. I had many friends, which was actually a first for me. People liked me for who I was and my crazy, wacky energy drew people to me like flies to honey. My teacher would spend hours with me after class, helping me to study if there was ever a fear of me falling behind. My parents were proud of me finally. My brother and I were getting along again after several years of not. I had my first boyfriend, with whom I had my first kiss. I still have his old address memorized. I also had my first best friend.

Jodie was an interesting girl. We were "on again off again" friends and she had the wild attitude of a girl we all knew would end up getting into a lot of trouble. That dangerous side of her was exactly what drew people to her. She was a year ahead of me in school, but she lived just up the lane from me and we would often go for walks together. Back then, seventh graders were too "cool" to play with dolls and plastic ponies. Yet, she had dolls in her bedroom that I was fairly certain she would play with when nobody was looking.

She was English and I was obsessed with her accent, as were most of the boys her age in the neighborhood. Her mother, Julie, had married an American man stationed in England and the three children came over when he was restationed in California just up the street from us. Her older brothers, Jason and Justin, were rather tall, handsome young men the girls would swoon over due to their dashing looks and English charm. I was no exception. Secretly I harbored a crush on Justin for many, many years. I finally got a chance to act on in many years later, but that's another story I've never told to another living soul. Maybe someday it will grace the pages of my blog, but for now I'll skip over that one. This is the story of the Sioux City Sasparilla and will remain G-rated, not delve into the darker side of my "bad girl" days of being a teen run away.

When the family moved to Arizona due to Mike being restationed (Yes, everyone else had J names, but Mike was their step-dad, so he married into this) my family decided to help. We loaded up in a uhaul truck and my Dad drove one with Jodie and I in the seat beside him. Being the smallest, I was stuck in the middle with the gear shifter vibrating up against my knee cap. It was a long, long drive.

We stayed for a week or more when we got there. The new house was large and spacious, though the weather was far too hot to go outside anyway. The neighbors had a swimming pool that was rarely used by the elderly couple unless their grand kids were visiting, so Jodie and I made it a priority to meet these people as soon as possible.

Jodie had a "trundle bed" under her bed that pulled out like a drawer. It wasn't the most comfortable bed in the world, but it worked for me. It wasn't all THAT bad. She had a TV in her room, which in those days was unheard of. We had a grand time, she and I. It didn't take long to figure out where the nearest store was and we would take daily walks down to the grocers and never buy anything. One day we walked down there with nothing but pockets full of change to use a brand new "Coin Star" machine we saw advertised to turn the coins into paper money. It was an amazing invention!

One of the nights we were there, all of us bundled up into a couple of cars and drove to an old fort. Inside the massive wooden walls, we wandered from shop to shop while waiting our turn to get into a steak restaurant. No expense was to be spared. I had my very own Prime Rib that night, the first I believe I was ever allowed to order off of a menu. I was after all only 12 years old.

Mike asked me if I would like a Sarsaparilla. I had no idea what that was, so I said I would love one, pretending inteligence. When they brought it out, I couldn't pretend any longer. What was this brown bottle before me with a picture of a cowboy standing between swinging doors? Had he ordered me something I was too young to drink? Was this a real beer sitting in front of me? When I asked, he laughed a deep, gutoral laugh that made me blush.

"It's like Root Beer" he explained. "Try it, I think you'll like it." I took a tiny, timid sip, agreed that it was very much like Root Beer, and continued until the entire thing was gone. It was delicious! I wasn't allowed to have sodas very often as a kid. They had too much sugar in them for us kids my parents would say. As soon as I polished off the one, I asked if it was ok if I got another. Within minutes, a second Sarsaparilla was brough to the table. This one I poured into the chilled glass they brought out with it. I loved the little ice crystals that formed around the top of the soda inside the glass. The pieces of frozen soda made my mouth very cold and I loved every second of it.

It wasn't long after that trip that my mom's brother, also named Mike, came to visit us while picking up a load of stuff somewhere in California. When I told him about my story, he told me one of his own that to this day I think of each time I see a Sioux City Sarsaparilla.

"The mountains near by are called the Superstition Mountains. Do you remember seeing them?"

"Yes," I replied, remembering clearly that the wooden fort we had visited actually seemed to be nestled into the base of some rather oddly shaped mountains.

"The legend of the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine comes from the Superstition Mountains, which is why the mountains got their name. Did you know that?"

"A gold mine?" I breathed.

"People say that a German man hid a lot of gold in the mountains. Some people say that the gold were bars to pay the Calvary that was stolen from a train. Other people say it was a cave that he found belonging to an indian tribe. People think they had used the cave for a sacred place of prayer and had some of their dead burried there, so the Apache Indians were angry about his intruding.

"The story goes that when he was dying in 1891, a woman by the name of Julia Thomas was taking care of him and he told her where he had hidden the gold. A lot of people claim they found the gold, but none were proven. People have been looking for the Lost Dutchman's Mine since 1892, only a year after it's said he told the woman where it was located.

"It's estimated that 8,000 people every year make some sort of effort to find the mine. I've done my own research and learned how to look for gold. A lot of people have gone out there and gotten lost, though. They end up either missing forever or someone finds them dead out in the middle of nowhere. People fall off the mountain, get lost and starve to death, and sometimes people can't figure out what killed them. They say the Apache's put a curse on the gold so that anyone who finds it will die a horrible death.


"The Dutchman was supposed to have a secret way of finding the cave. If you stand on one mountain peak and look through an opening in the rocks called 'The Eye of the Needle' you can see the exact location of where he hid the entrance to the cave. I look for it each time I go through Arizona, but I've never found it. Maybe someday I'll be rich, and you will be the only person who knows why..."

A few years later my Uncle Mike taught me how to go gold panning, but no, he's not rich quite yet. I hold out hope.


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