Flash in the Pan Blog

I wanted to write something to describe what there is to do in Liberty for those who haven't yet been.

As Saturday came Chris and I kept watching the weather...snow was coming...We said, "Oh Great!" We have worked so hard getting ready for show season, now snow, no one will be coming. As I drove to the Monroe fairgrounds, snow kept falling....to my disbelief, there were hundreds of happy prospectors gathered around our booth! Kudos to our hardy NW propsectors! We can't keep them down!

Last night's monthly Prospectors Plus Member's Hootenanny was a real blast. Beyond gathering together in our favorite little Sultan Sahara Pizza shop for some great grub, with more than twenty-five of your closest prospecting buddies two big debuts happened.

Wouldn’t yeah know it, but our very own club president Larry Nye and his diabolical son Cody have used the downtime of the holiday break to poke around on the Olney claim and ended up running across a great stash of gold. As Larry puts it, “There is nothing like spending a few days with your son in a place like Olney Creek.”

As any respectable prospector would do, I tend to keep my eyes open wherever I go, diligently looking for sign of the good yellow stuff. With my family in Florida on vacation, prospecting never really left my mind. As we traveled around hitting all the hot spots, I prospected around every corner I rounded, under many of the rocks that laid strewn about us and along the edges of deep pools that are readily abundant in the deep south. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet seen any real color, but I did uncover something – something that simply disgusted me as a recreational small-scale miner. As the title eludes, and you have probably figured out by now, I found proof of both illegal mining (using very old machinery and highly volatile explosives) and slave labor. That’s right – slave labor.

A Saturday morning starts at 5 am seems really early to me, but the offer to run the new G2 highbanker at the Prospectors Plus Member’s Outing was just too rich to pass up. It turns out the day started just a touch earlier than expected as at 3:30 am a cat vocalizing some distress (real or feigned who can say?) woke me out of slumber. That is when my day started.

Well, if you missed the Prospectors Plus Member’s Dredge Camp 2010 – you really missed out. What a blast! There were more than 40 members able to attend during the weekend outing, running about a dozen or so dredges (including Doug’s 4-inch monster) right on the #7 claim on Williams Creek. In addition to the mountains of great food put on by our very own master chef Laren, there was loads of different equipment for people to try their hand at (like the new Gold Grabber II) and many new friends to meet. It was a fantastic first ‘big’ event for our club!

Michele posted her report on the first monthly member's hootenanny, held on September 1 in Sultan. You can read her report, here.

Well, the day had finally come – at 6pm Saturday night, I got the call from Chris Brawn that my prospecting partner Angus Lee and I had been waiting on for several weeks. Chris informed me that our 2” Chameleon Dredge from Angus MacKirk was in and proposed that rather than coming down to the shop to pick it up, that we take delivery the following morning at the dredge session he was sponsoring for Prospectors Plus members on Olney Creek. This was fantastic news. Not only would Angus and I have a dredge of our very own to play with, Chris also graciously offered to show us how to set everything up, demonstrate some basic dredging technique and a find us a good spot on the river to get wet in. I greedily accepted the offer and quickly placed a call to Angus to give him the good news and for a minute thought that in his enthusiastic agreement to join me on the river that he slipped into rapid fire Chinese (which I don’t understand).

The annual Gold Dust Days Heritage Festival was a phenomenal event drawing great crowds across all three days and really showed off the grand hospitality of Gold Bar. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the weather was absolutely Washington State perfect (for the uninitiated, that’s low-80’s with a cool breeze) and the list of festival events has grown even bigger than ever. Amongst the festival fare of parades (there were two), art booths, live entertainment, BBQ and Show-n-Shine motorcycle, lawnmower and auto shows, the good people of the Washington State Civil War Association encamped right in middle of it all – cannons blazing on the hour. How cool is that?

Starting June 5th, we will be having our gold panning classes on the river. Come learn how to gold pan and find gold with a real working gold miner. Classes start at 9am- meet at the store. $25 for 4 hours. Following the class, there will be a an awesome BBQ. A loyal store member, Laren Munson, and an award winning BBQ pit master will be hosting this BBQ event.