Light Posting Ahead

Due to a number of factors, posting here will be light for an indeterminate period of time. Instead of lengthy analysis and commentary, the fare will consist primarily of excerpting interesting material found on the internet or elsewhere, then providing a few brief comments, although admittedly, brevity is not something that comes easily here.

Eventually, the production of original material will return to levels to which readers have become accustomed over the last year.

Here are a couple pictures left over from our trip northward last month. This gold specimen is in a vault adjacent to the gold mining museum / gift shop at Ironstone Vineyards, in Murphys, California. Inside a glass enclosure it appears to be suspended in air, but if you look closely, there is a dark metal bar that supports it.


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It is about three feet in height and weights 44 pounds. It wass actually found in the 1990s, some 20 miles away from Murphys in Jamestown, California, and is crystalline leaf gold (layers of gold along with other minerals) rather than a very large gold nugget.

It still looks pretty impressive.


Click to enlarge

The entire Gold Country area of California is pretty fascinating, even more so since gold has doubled in price in recent years. After seeing many gold mining museums and exhibits, the (comparatively) harsh conditions of remote, mostly lawless locales from a hundred and fifty years ago seem best captured in the HBO series Deadwood, which begins its third season later this year.