Yesterday, arranged to go down and pan for gold with Chris. Trail. There's some great cracks in a bedrock exposure I'd seen from the road, worth checking out.
But, driving out through Nelson, nearing the old homeless camp, we pass a small table with a handmade sign up - "Magic Rocks for Sale". A little kid is sitting with his mom at a little table covered with rocks. And there's no getting away from it, we have to stop.
The kid, a folding little TV Dinner table, on it he's got about 30 pieces of gravel. The same gravel as we're standing on. A little jar full of money. We look at the rocks. They're gravel. Just gravel. Literally the same gravel we're standing on. And I want to support small business and enterprising youth and so I ask "How Much?".
The kid hums and haws, he's got the gravel sorted into about 4 little piles on the table, there's no difference in any of them, they're all just gravel, but he's giving us the prices...."This pile it's $5.00 a rock....". I'm incredulous, but I don't dare say, his mom is there, it's a little, a lot out of my league. SO Chris and I go back to the truck, scrounge up a few crystals and fluorite lost at the bottom of my rucksack, Chris finds him some pieces of silver ore, we give it to him. Who knows, maybe one day he could be working for me?
Anyways, onward to Trail:
A bit of panning, next to no gold, Chris finds a few flakes - tiny, not worth the effort, and after a bit of crevassing I give up and go and canvas the landscape. This bedrock is pretty cool:
Coarse feldspar sills, smoky quartz, granular crystals like pegmatites but lacking in the mica and other minerals. The basalt has cooked out the minerals - clear divisions and cavities in the rock.
Clearly I wasn't the only one who found this interesting...
In the pan, fine sand, under the loop - black sand, lots of garnet - pyrope, almandine, some citrine, green stones which I guess to be olivine (given the basalts), quartz.
These would be the pretty pictures if I could find a way to take their picture. I need my USB Microscope...
The chromites excite me - the green - in conjunction with the garnets, are used as indicators for diamonds. Maybe it's not all quartz. When I have pictures I'll share.
Anyways, that - more or less, was the day.