Chapter 14

“Gold?” Oops.

<Maybe.>

Maybe?

<Only two things certain in this life.>

Death and taxes?

<Death and the government will fuck you.>

Geology says there is no gold on this side of the mountain.

<Geology is right.>

Why do I want to look for it on this side?

<Because this isn’t in the mountains.>

I shrugged, pouted and rolled my eyes.

From the air it is easy to see where Wolf Creek is today. From the air it possible to see where Wolf Creek WAS. The creek banks that used to be. Wolf Creek rises high in the mountains and cut a meandering swath. In ancient times, floods inundated the canyons because once the Big Horns were higher, held more snow, caused more rain, cut older paths.

Water has ever sought the path of least resistance. Earthquakes block streams but water finds a way. Glaciers block rivers with immense ice dams. The water floods making a lake. The lake had nowhere to go until the water is too deep ... Ice floats. Ice dams lift, fracture from sheer weight and a lake empties in hours if not in minutes. Rivers do it ... creeks also ... a smaller scale ... but none the less...

If a tree falls in the woods and there is no ear to hear is there sound? If an ice dam blocks a river or stream and fails and there is no one to see ... does it flood the plain? Because you didn’t hear or see doesn’t matter ... the act happened and no matter of denial can change it.

Gold is heavy... 19.3 grams per cubic centimeter. There are heavier metals but most are not found naturally occurring. Alluvial gold is heavy ... for its size it’s very heavy ... heavier than the rocks, but it is subject to movement by water. Other than mining and seismic activity, gold pretty much stays where it is.

Gold is often found in quartz. Gold not bound up in quartz is seeking bedrock. “How Low can She Go?”

Quartz Creek is tributary to Wolf Creek. In fact ... at their junction, Quartz Creek is a more impressive body ... Wolf being a trickle and Quartz a rushing stream. They didn’t name Wolf, Quartz ... they kept calling it Wolf Creek. But ... they both have left evidence of major shifts in the watershed. Higher stream channels cut millennia ago stretch along valley slopes.

The Bighorns lifted up from under 9000 feet of sedimentary deposition 70 million years ago and have been subjected to alternating periods of glaciation and ice free ... called interglacial ... beginning about two and a half million years ago.

Ice as much two and a half miles (13,000 feet) thick assaulted the land, causing scraping, erosion and massive alteration of the mountainscape. Minerals deposited and disappeared over tens of thousands of years. The last northern continental ice cap melted 17, 000 years ago ... except for Greenland, Iceland and a scattered few Alpine ice accumulations ... all giving notice that the glacial period ain’t over.

There are numberless places where tortured bedrock is folded, twisted, upended and shattered and in those places, mineralization has occurred. Quartz ... gold bearing Quartz ... solidifies in the cracks, splits and cavities of seismically active bedrock.

Periods of flooding ... sea level was 400 feet lower than today at the beginning of the “Great Melt” ... moved boulders the size of houses as easily as a child pushes a pebble. Grinding, cutting new paths for masses of water unimaginable ... the yearly effluent of all the rivers of today carried to the sea in a day. Massive walls of water slicing through rock, hill and forest, changing what we can only imagine was to what we have today.

Water that reached an area of area so great that it slowed ... the boulders dropped ... the rocks ceased to tumble ... the gold found a resting place ... and were covered with the silt of glaciation only to have the mass of water seek and find another path to the sea. Some of that water is still in mountain lakes.

The oceans contain 40 percent of the worlds gold. (Geology 101 MSU 1985)

The rapid movement of massive amounts show in the topography. Expand the undulations of sand acted upon by ocean waves a thousand fold and examine the meadows of the land Wolf Creek meanders through to day ... The ripples ... and the beaches are there. Massive water moving gold massively. (Conversations during 14 years as an Archaeologist for MSU... 1985 to 1999.)

Nearly due north of the cabin, between Wolf Creek and Wolf Creek road is a couple of oxbows left when the creek sought a smoother path. The stream cut a path through softer rock ... as it has been doing since the melt ... and left a dike of bedrock ... uplifted to near vertical and strewn with fractures and boil holes. Downstream, not a hundred yards the creek begins to braid, leaving multitudes of banks and turns as far east as the foot hills and as far west as the rise of the stone bulwark of the Bighorns.

None of the neighbors have any diaries or journals of the event that left the oxbow. Since property lines often included natural boundaries, streams, ridges and canyon walls in the description of who owns what, a change could affect fields and cattle ... even houses.

I must assume the change was earlier than 1880. The Crow would have no talking history as they are newcomers. The churches destroyed any ledgers or hides of the other tribes, removed by the army to less advantageous lands, I have no idea how old the change is. All I have is the record of lichens on the boulders left behind by the change ... and they ain’t talking. Newspaper records make no mention ... in any case they would be useless ... America is such a new country.

The aircraft were disassembled, the junk moved to the Department of Educations new facility. The Winter class on Flintlocks 201 completed, the engine from the 1948 Ford pickup in the shop getting a stroker crank and 40 over pistons, the new 302 chevy V8 for the pickup resting on new mounts between the rails, the 3 window coupe almost ready for the all aluminum 340 hemi custom cast by Jim’s Auto. Over square with short high revving rods and crank, she should be a screamer Tired of scraping the ways on the old lathe, I looked for an escape.