Can you see Minnie below?
I found a hiking trail up the road a bit from my campsite. The trail cuts up steeply along the hill and comes out high above the river. From the top there are nice views in three directions. You can tell that the mountains are not as majestic in this area as they are along the coast but it’s still pretty in its own way.
I explored a back road behind Mayo that took me out to a gravel bar beside the Mayo River. I grabbed my gold pan and did a couple test pans but didn’t find anything big enough to keep.
Dredging the river.
Later in the afternoon I talked with one of the inspectors working on the river a few hundred feet from my camp. Every day they have an excavator digging out the river and loading it into dump trucks. The inspector said that the town has had some flooding because of ice building in the river and they think that dredging it deeper will help with the flow.
I told him that they should be running that river gravel through a sluice to get the gold out of it. He laughed and said they were joking about the same thing. He said that one of the machine operators had tried a pan and found a little bit. They have been piling the dirt up behind the campground so I may sneak down there later and try my luck.
A lot of sunshine!
It starts to get daylight here about 4 AM too. Crazy! Of course, that’s not sunrise but still enough to often wake me up.
I panned for gold on a cruise excursion a couple years ago. (Planted gold dust in a small bag of dirt.) It was all flakes, but I found quite a bit all together. It adds up!
Does it ever get fully dark? You are not too far south of the circle and the solstice is coming in a few days. It would be interesting to see the midnight sun.
I don’t know. I don’t stay up all night to see, but every time I wake up it is still light outside.