gold

May

2013

Columbia State Park

A good deal of the recreation in California in the summer months centers around water, or the highest parts of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The Pacific Ocean brings mild weather with ocean breezes, and the Sierras offer high altitude relief from the constant heat of the San Joaquin Valley. The truth is, for all the great recreation available in California, it’s a hot, dry landscape in the summer months. It’s not called the “Golden State” because of the gold rush in the 19th century, but for the golden fields of dried up grass. For the most part, the summer in California is a dry, uncomfortably hot place. Continue reading →

May

2013

Bodie State Park

We’ve all seen the classic western movies depicting life in the west, and the glorious days of the American cowboy. The “wild west” has always seemed like the place to be in a perfect world, and, of course, Jesse James was made into a hero by American folk lore. Of course, make any trip to a restored ghost town that has a minimal museum, and a good look at the dental tools used back then could probably change your mind about the glory of the old west. Those were hard times. The people who lived then did not enjoy everyday luxuries, and the tools used (it’s hard to call them “instruments”) by dentists paint a picture of the wild west that’s anything but fun. Continue reading →

May

2013

Gold Mining Techniques

There are three principal methods of gold mining in California. Placer mining was one of the most popular, and involved removing gold from deposits in the ground, where it washed down from larger deposits. A faster, and much more destructive method was hydraulic mining, where gold was forcibly removed from deposits by spraying deposits with high volume, high pressure nozzles, washing entire hillsides down to a sluicing operation where heaver elements, like gold, could be separated out. The third mining method is hard rock ore mining where ore is extracted from mine shafts or open pit operations. The ore undergoes treatment that extracts gold salts from the ore, then goes through a smelting process to re-constitute the gold.

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