You can't make this stuff up...

I'm just getting around to posting pictures of what I did last weekend. I'm doing this so my mama can get a good laugh. You see...my husband is a thirty something trapped in the body of a sixty something year old. His hobby is gold prospecting, and he even has a website where he sells gold dirt (a.k.a. concentrates). No kidding.

Well...Brian talked me into going camping/prospecting with him in North Carolina. Technically, we had a room - not a tent. But there was no room service or restauraunt on site, and accommodations were sparse...close enough to camping for me!

Friday night we arrived in time to say hello to some of Brian's friends that were there and then we headed out for Mexican. (Okay...I confess...I'm not really a camper.) But we did come back and make s'mores around the campfire of our friends who were actually camping.

Sometimes - it doesn't take much to amuse me - I had some fun playing with a slow shutter speed and Conley's glow sticks.




Here is proof that I really did do some prospecting. This may not be a shocker for some of you...but I don't exactly like to get dirty. Just for frame of reference...do you remember the plaster of paris hand print that every child makes growing up? Well...I'm probably the only person who made it to adulthood without one. I don't remember this, but apparently I don't have one because I refused to put my hands in the gooey, green plaster when I was four years old in Vacation Bible School. :)

The contraption in front of me is called a highbanker. We shoveled a HUGE pile of dirt into it. After almost three hours of shoveling - we were left with an impressive amount of gold.


This is the Broad river that runs along Heather Grove. After we finished running the highbanker, we headed down to the river so Brian could run his dredge.


I walked down the river and looked for things to take pictures of. I found some clover...


...and some prettyugly texture on an old bridge. (I made up the word prettyugly.)




This is Brian's five inch dredge. It is like a big vaccum cleaner. It has a big hose that he uses under water to suck up dirt. It dumps the water out in the sluice box and the concentrates with gold are left behind.


I didn't take part in the dredging. It looked like a lot of hard work. You have to throw lots of rocks out of the water to get to the dirt.


The river was full of people dredging. This girl was dredging for the first time. They use regulators so that they can go deep and stay under water for a long time.


Crazy, huh? But I swear it's true. I'll have to get a picture of the gold that we found.
If you want to know more about gold prospecting, be sure to check out Brian's Gold Grubbin' site. He even has a link to his popular gold forum on the site.