So, off exploring with Chris - using wisely the last few days of freedom. Still too snowy to go anyways up the mountains, but there's a surprising amount to be discovered at the lower elevations:
Probably a deer bone, kicked out of the moss.
Mine at Woodbury, floor lined with water. An absolutely terrific place to send the kids exploring, if I'd known about it when they were younger...
Walls crusted with brittle sulfite crystals, grown since the mine was abandoned. Geologically a blink in time, imagine what will have grown in another thousand, ten thousand years?
piece of silver ore, already oxidizing on the break. Heavy, (which gives you the grade of ore), silvery-black when freshly broken with a cubic structure.
Another piece of ore, very heavy (high grade), oxidized, you can see the cubic structure and a bit of the metallic luster underneath the oxidization. Maybe 2 inches wide, but a full pound in weight.
If I could clean these up and seal them they'd sell as great specimens...
Hmmm.
Chris scrambling up to new mine, hidden just off the road. Curiously baked rock.
Shaft's all crumbled in, so no exploring there. Dated bolt on tree - October 1922 (??). Now there's so much of this hardware up there it gets me thinking what could I do to upcycle this? I mean, cool and all, how to repurpose so it doesn't go to waste and I can see some salvage value?
Spools of abandoned cable/wire.
Finally, an abandoned miners cabin, invisible from the road, worth maybe taking the metal detector up when there's less snow, but you can soon get tired of digging out all the discarded iron. Still, one day maybe something worthwhile? There are hundreds up here, surely somewhere around one there's gotta be something....