The past few weeks, having found abundant crystals, I've gone looking for other gems and stones of interest. And it's not been too successful, a few hundred dollars gas, a few thousand km on logging roads, and verily nothing to show for it.
The first claim, well away from civilization, but there's logging road access, and I check Google Maps and plan my routes...
Drive 10 K in route one, run into deep snow, too early yet...
Route 2, at 12 KM in, is blocked by a rockfall, sheer cliffs on either side make driving around it impossible, and if I had an 8 or 10 foot bar I just might be able to move a few and open it up again, but for the moment it's out of the question.
This day is a failure.
I choose another location for my next days off, same mineralogy, different area. And driving in, on a decommissioned logging road, up, up, slowing down for 3' deep ruts every hundred meters, and getting closer, getting closer, and then no....
Somehow the map, the google satellite view, it's wrong, and so I try another approach, follow the map on google, but am bushwhacked and slapped by a thousand saplings that have sprouted up on the clearly marked satellite view, have to stop, this is insane, and try another route...
A one mile hike in, on a clean logging road inaccessible by car, but the claim, it's just over that creek, that teeny tiny creek on the map, that just happens to be about 10 meters wide and in full spring runoff...
Fail.
(view from logging road to nowhere...)
All these failures, they're making me a bit obsessive, and the week following I go to try again, the boys here to visit, he'll love this...
But the road, no more snow, and driving further in, further in, we run into a landslide. Proper full on landslide, road closed, forever.
Still 15 to 20 KM from the target, I can write off this access point. Completely.
We've had a few of these failures, and so I take him to a few places where I know we'll find something, this prospecting, it's 99.9% looking and .1 percent finding, and he's getting a little discouraged, but I take him to few of the places I know where we can find crystals and poke about and explore, where we can get where we're going to...
Inside a very dodgy mine. Touch nothing, and limit the depth of one's exploration...
But some great photo ops, and the boy acknowledges this day isn't so much the write off other days have been...
The stopes falling over, and a ceiling, low and stooped slowly in the process of falling in...
When the boy is gone I return, back to the original quest, location 2, park at the closest access and get out and walk. 10 KM on a road that's been overgrown for 20 years, covered in deciduous saplings, had to get out and fill in ruts on the road for half an hour at a time to even get this close, and eventually, finding the claim, searching it over for minerals of interest, there are things of interest, for sure, but nothing so obvious that I can put my finger on, and 10 KM in means 10 KM out, it's a damned big area, a steep mountainside, and I've only an hour before the sun begins to set, grab a few samples, nothing extraordinary, lots to explore, but this hike in, out, it's grueling, no trail, forever being swatted with trees and branches, I won't be back here anytime soon, there are ample other places to investigate...
All in all a full month of failures, some new discoveries, but nothing I can monetize as of yet, and it's proven the old adage "The Map is Not the Territory", the map, google maps, easily 20 or more years out of date and I can't help thinking but there's got to be an easier way...