Chapter 2

Mitchell’s Creek, Sunny Corner, New South Wales, Australia:2

“You sure?”

“Yup ... just falling rocks,” Jim said. I was willing to take his word for it ... except ... he explained the How of Thermal Expansion and the Why it happened. He was just getting into gravity when he noticed my eyes glazing over. “I suppose we ought to get back to work.”

“Huh?” I said, and faked a yawn.

It was dusty and hot back in our little dry rill but I persevered. Jim was crevassing, and I hauled buckets of excavated dirt down to Mitchell’s Creek and Jim’s homebuilt high banker...

Crevassing:

There are crevasses and there are Crevasses. Crevasses are narrow cracks in ice or rock walls that are generally big enough to get stuck in. Getting stuck in a big C crevasse is probably going to end up badly. Rescue squads and maybe a helicopter ... and a possible broken part of the stuck might be the result. In ice, a crevasse might close ... dire if you’re in it at the time. Your future relatives might care enough to be there when that part of the glacier either melts or calves off to collect a blood smear to bury ... far future relatives ... ice crevasses generally keep company with glaciers. You’ve heard of glacially slow?

Little c crevasses are cracks in the top of bedrock and you might manage to get a finger stuck ... if there happened to be an earthquake ... the earthquake would be much more worrying than the stick finger.

Jim had a series of tools he used to scratch out the accumulated leavings of floods.

Why bother?

During a flood, the water level in a creek or river raises. Various impediments to the flow get swept away. Steep slopes reach saturation and the soil begins to head down slope. House Rock in the Gallatin river is just a piece of rock that was displaced from its original habitat to the middle of the river. During dryer weather House Rock is the size of a Victorian Mansion. It sticks up out of the river like the Washington Monument ... not that tall ... but huge. During snowmelt and runoff House Rock is this little corner of stone sticking up out of the water ... the water gets that high. All that water moves things ... House Rock tumbled down river like a chip of wood and actually floated on the rushing waters.

That’s an example.

Gold is about as heavy as it gets and during normal spring flood runoff it tumbles along the bedrock rounding and compressing edges ... and looking for places to hide. Cracks that run parallel to the flow are washed clean and add to the already moving gold. Cracks that are perpendicular create eddies; and gold loves eddies. Because it’s heavier than the sand and silt, some gold gets caught in the crack and settles in. As the flood recedes (loses volume and velocity) the heavier black (iron) sands lodge in the crack, covering the gold. Muds and small stones rest on top of the black sands and the slower movement of the water continues to pack the crack tighter. Volunteer grass seed sprouts and more and more dirt and gravel settle in and soon the bedrock is covered with dirt. It rains ... more soil is washed down from the hillside ... soil that contains gold dust and the occasional “picker” (gold that can be pinched between thumb and finger and picked up) and that gold seeks the bottom ... because it’s heaviest and likes to hide. Bedrock is as far as it can go.

Disinterest and low mineral prices keep the amateur prospector home for years ... but the flood is an annual occurrence: gold keeps moving to the bottom of creek and riverbeds. That’s general physics.

Sure, there’s the “crank hobbyist” ... he’s the guy who kept your ball when it bounced into his yard. On week ends he takes his loaded pickup or car and heads for the mountains ... going camping ... he said.

He’s not married ... or he is and wishes he wasn’t ... or he takes her with when he goes. Maybe he started out as a fisherman ... or photographer, painter, sailor sick of the sea ... something. Gold panning can be a pass time.

Jim is a professional firefighter ... maybe he started out in Sydney ... and hates the city ... but he’s in New South Wales over the Blue Mountains and somehow, someway, he has the “GoldBug.” He has every grain of gold he’s ever recovered ... keeps it in a highly polished dish in a glass fronted cabinet in his den. He’s not in it for the money. Talk to him ... he’s uneducated, coarse and profane ... until he talks about moving water. Some Earth Science professors should learn from him. He knows ... because he’s watched water work.

“Water seeks the easiest path. If the mountains get in the way, water seeks the softer rock, cuts through it and continues downhill until the next block. It finds its way and carries material with it.”

He’ll point out scrabble piles and diggings high up on the mountain or hills. “Once the water was up there, deposited gold, the old timers dug it up.”

Hanging out with Jim was an education.

We packed up, headed back to civilization, and scoped out the leavings of the mines and diggings of the last two centuries on the way. Smelters, crushers, tailing piles, stone walls, dikes, ditches, ponds, bridges, rail right-of-ways, old roads, footbridges ... Jim knew them ... photographed them ... and posted them in social media ... You Tube ... Facebook ... Twiter.