Panning for Gems and Digging for Gold

We went to Hiddenite, N.C. to an emerald mine.  You buy buckets of dirt and you pan through the dirt and find semi-precious stones in the dirt.  There are emeralds, rubies, quartz, sapphires, garnets in the buckets.  They have 63 different types of gems and minerals occurring in this area.  So this is what we ended up with and now we just have to decide what to do with it.

Actually you can pay to turn them into these.  So we might do that to some of them later.  Right now they just look like rocks.

Then we went back to the Cotton Patch Mine one more time and bought a few more buckets of their dirt to pan.  We found more gold than we did the first time but still not enough to make up for the cost of the buckets.  So it was fun to do it but we decided we had done enough.  Also we lost the vial of gold from our  first two times.  I thought sure it would turn up but so far it hasn't. 

So for our next adventure we decided to try panning in a creek.  There is a national forest that has quite a few creeks in it and from our GPAA Mining Guide I found out they find gold in them.  On looking for the creeks we came  across this old grave yard

There were quite a few creeks listed.  We found one, I wasn't sure it was one of the ones listed for gold but we decided to try it.  We walked down the creek and we could see signs that there had been people digging in it.  I tried for a while and got bored with it.  So I wandered around and took pictures of Ed.

We didn't find anything.  Later on, looking at the web site, I found out there are quite a few snakes in the area.  I am so glad we didn't see any.  I also found out you have to dig down 2 to 3 feet.  We didn't go down anywhere near that far. I wonder if we had, if we would have found something.  We will never know, because we never went back.  I did find an abandoned tent.  I wonder why someone would leave their tent behind, let alone the fact they are littering.

We were staying at a Thousand Trails campground in North Carolina.  Ed wasn't impressed with the campsites.  Here we are and here is a picture of Ed cleaning the MH.  When we were in Florida we weren't able to wash it because everyone said there was a shortage of water.  So the coach was really dirty.

We were going to stay in North Carolina 3 weeks, but we decided we had spent enough money on trying to find gold.  We left a week early.

Well we decided to make a straight shot home.  We went up thru Pennsylvania and then on the Ohio turnpike.  Between Ohio and Indiana we spent $45 on tolls.  The traffic wasn't too bad and we were able to spend the night at a toll plaza.  We are home in Elkhart and we will be here about 2 months. 

HAPPY TRAILS  Love Ed and Lyn