Blue Lakes and Meander Meadow, page 23

After a leisurely breakfast of potato salad and beer, some late morning reading and another beer and Fritos, I donned my boots and we explored around this old-time mining site.

At one cabin site we found an old coffee can, pattern faintly visible on the label, but name indiscernible. We also found some sort of burner and a lot of rusty old nails in glass. The ore concentrator is located to the south, slightly up the hill. Inside the splintered timbers are twisted rusty pipes, part of some sort of furnace and tanks buried in the ground. They look newer.

The drunken miners have left nothing behind them but bent aluminum lawn chairs, a white plastic helmet, a rubber boot, plenty of garbage, and a sit-down plastic toilet. I did not investigate their site as closely as the old mine site.

We walked on further up the hill and found piles of red ore and a weird looking machine on flattened rubber wheels that might have been some sort of compressor or generator. Plus there were three small pits dug into the hillside, one quite recently.

And that's all I did today, except to read, eat and snooze. I sort of think that spring by the junction to our upper basin may be as dry as most of the streams down here. We did find water in one stream near the trashy miner's site, however.

– The end!