Category Archives: Adventure

Afternoon blogsters:

Yesterday I told you a bit about a happening early in the No Name Canyon debacle.  It was a beginning, of sorts.  But myriad other tales of foolishness were to come out of that channel before any sort of conclusion.  The lightning storm experienced just elevated the level of priority for solving the mysteries there.

A while after the lightning/shovel event my old buddy Mel King and I were in that canyon determined to move a lot of dirt some easier way than with a pick and shovel.  I’ve told you a bit about Mel in an earlier blog entry here.

The bottom of that canyon’s already been described as V-bottomed, which is was.  But in the small box where the channel began there was a sedimentation layer I guessed to be 6-8 feet deep, judging from the angle where the walls would intersect underneath the surface.  It was clear that water ceased to move enough of that sedimentation to stratify things a long time before all the current material arrived on the scene.  I’d been getting all the stuff from the earlier visit I described out of the soil about a foot below the surface, which didn’t involve hardpan or bedrock.

Mel and I were relatively convinced the bottom of the Vee underneath all that unstratified material would be a glory hole.  Our reasoning was that in the distant past there was enough water movement to create the channel, so it should have dumped the richest material early and taken it as deep as it could go.

Neither of us had an explosives license, dynamite had become a hard-to-get commodity, equipment other than shovels was out of the question, so we made up a mess of home-made black powder.

Mel, his man-sized son Eric, and I trekked in there with every intention of moving some serious dirt and rock.  We dug down at what we calculated to be the best spot, about 3.5 feet and placed a pound of powder into the hole inside a plastic bottle.  We made a fuse by pouring a powder train into a masking tape tube and stuck that down into the powder vessel.

Meanwhile, Eric gathered as many musk melon sized boulders as he could find and we carefully placed them around and above the charge up to about a foot below the surface with the fuse sticking a few inches above the covering material.

A herd of geniuses at work.

I lit a cigarette and slid the unlighted end about an inch down around the end of the fuse, and we hurried down canyon about 75 yards just around a bend to wait for the big event.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

After about half an hour it was clear we had a problem.  Someone had to go try to see if the cig had gone out, or what.  Naturally, we all went, each trying to say a bit behind the others.

We arrived on the scene, bent down over the fuse and all jumped backward in rolling runs down canyon.  There was smoke coming out of that hole.

We repeated this sequence twice before we decided we’d just come back another day and try to figure out what happened.

Never did get around to trying to explode that canyon bottom again.

Jack

Afternoon blogsters:

JAP69 pointed out to me in a comment on the Lightning Strike entry that I didn’t explain myself in a way I could expect anyone to understand, which I appreciate.  Sometimes I take too much for granted.

Gold, silver, platinum and several other precious metals are the heaviest elements around.  When the rocks weather away from around them and erosion carries them into channels it drops them at the first opportunity.  It takes a lot of energy (velocity) for the water to carry any particulate, but it takes more, the greater the density of the material being moved.  So the heaviest sediment load drops to the bottom first.

Prospectors rely on this.  It’s how placer gold is found.  Nature has spent millions of years concentrating these precious metals, shaking the ligher overburdens with water movement, sinking the heavier particles to the bottom of the sediment layers.

Lighter than the precious metals, but heavier than the silicone sands the water also carries, is the black sand.  It’s mainly an iron product.

So a prospector studies the channel, examines it for places where the water loses energy, particularly during flood stage.  Where there’s a curve in the channel there’ll be a place just on the downstream side of the curve where the stream drops silt.  That’s one of the places a prospector looks for gold.  Similarly, backwaters behind rocks and other obstructions, ancient beaver dams, anywhere the stream flow was interrupted.

The prospector digs into these spots and finds a hardpan or bedrock, or maybe a crack.  He takes the material and places it into a pan, sluicebox, dry washer, and agitates it to stratify the material, just as nature has done to concentrate the metals in this spot.

Gradually the prospector washes away the sand until there’s only black sand in the lower rim of his pan, and hopefully a few specks of gold, sometimes a nugget.

What happened to me in No Name Canyon was that there was a LOT of material that was heavier than black sand.  So much of it that the black sand was floating above it in a barely noticeable layer.  Such things don’t happen, or happen so rarely that when a person sees them he tends not to consider it a possibility.

There’s a thing that happens to gold sometimes.  It’s called telluride.  Prospectors have to know about it to recognize it.  Throughout history prospectors who didn’t recognize telluride gold because it doesn’t look like gold, have thrown it aside with a few curses because it’s screwing up their panning.

Jack

Morning blogsters:

Someone told me about some poor guy in Waco, Texas, who got himself electrocuted.  Guy was a minister standing in a baptismal about to baptize someone in front of a congregation of 800.  Reached for a microphone and got struck dead.

I commented that it was a bit like being struck by lightning, to which the reply was, “No it wasn’t!  You don’t get struck by lightning from carelessness and stupidity.”

Fact is, that’s precisely why people tend to get struck by lightning, along with a bit of lousy luck.  Lightning behavior is a lot more easily predictable than lottery numbers.

I went on to tell the story of something that happened to me along those lines once.

I was working a canyon I’d dubbed “No Name Canyon”.  I was finding something completely absorbing and confusing.  Heavy precious metals sink to the bottom of a pan, get covered by the next heaviest, which is magnetite or hematite, black sand.

I was in a heavily mineralized area and the bottom of the pan should have been filled with black sand, but I wasn’t getting any.  About an inch or more in the bottom of the pan was filled with a grainy material of a reddish brown color that was pervasive and frustrating.  (Sometimes you get to expecting what not to see and find yourself not seeing what’s in front of you)

Anyway, I’d worked there alone half the afternoon in that V-bottomed canyon when I heard thunder and saw clouds moving across the sliver of sky visible to me.  I didn’t care to get caught in that canyon in a cloudburst, so I hoisted my daypack, shovel, pan and headed up the mountain.

About halfway back up there’s a relatively steep, bald face just with a scattering of large pines.  That’s where I realized I was a damned fool.

Suddenly lightning was striking all around me.  I gave it some quick thought and decided my best shot was to sort of lie down on the slope, though lying down doesn’t precisely describe what I was doing because of the grade.

So, it began sprinkling some, lighting hitting everywhere, me wondering if I make less of a target this way, when I observed that every tree within my range of seeing had a lightning strike burn on it.  That place has been a magnet for lightning for a long time.

I reached to push the shovel further away from myself in case the metal might make a better target.  As I gazed at the sprinkles hitting the blade of the shovel, where there was still a lot of residue of what I’d been digging below, I suddenly found myself looking at black sand washing out of the small clods glued to the surface.

Hmmm, thinks I.  That is really weird.  I couldn’t get any black sand down below, but here it is on the shovel.  Lots of it.

Then it came to me.  The stuff on the bottom of the pan was heavier than the black sand and was floating it.  I’d been looking for the black sand below below the brown grainy material on the assumption that what I was looking at was worthless.

Instead I was looking at something the likes of which I’d never seen before, thanks to being on a mountainside with lightning striking all around me like the fool I have a tendency to be.

Anyway, the storm ended, left me unstruck, but a lot wiser.  I’d never have understood what was happening mineral-wise in that canyon if I hadn’t been stupid and careless.  But on that day I managed to also have mama-luck on my side.

Jack

A map and compass, a shoulder rig, a bag of bugler, a rag hat and some color in the bottom of a pan leads to the kinds of moments people tend to remember.

If you young guys have noticed your lives don’t include moments you care to remember you might put some imagination into changing it.

Give some thought to tossing out the television, Good-Willing that jacket with the football team emblem on the back, and go find yourself something worth remembering,

Jack

Morning blogsters:

It’s alway good to see the government backing away from sticking its nose into the private lives of the citizenry.  The Texas voters have wisely forced the Texas government to divorce itself from the issue of marriage.

In Texas it used to be illegal even to take a gull across a sedate lion for immortal porpoises, for gosh sakes.  Talk about government scattering itself around to find unlikely events to prohibit.

Wasn’t long ago Sammy Davis Jr. used to forever get himself in trouble for having some sort of genital exchange with women of the white gender, which was forbidden a lot of places.

I’m glad to see Texans point out to the Texas government that matters of marriage are private, spiritual and no business of the government.  Same with sex, for the most part.  The voters of Texas have demanded their government cease recognizing the institution of marriage.

Now people can go back to jumping across a broomstick, whatever, without having to worry about the thorny future issues of divorce, tax breaks for marriage partners, anything but just marriage bliss until death do them part.

In a somewhat fluid gender-environment of the brave new world questions such as who can marry whom achieve an ambiguity probably too complex, anyway.  There’s already been a case where two lesbians married one another in Texas because one of the two was born male.

Twenty years ago it was still a misdemeanor to shoot an Indian on a street car in Austin, which no longer had street cars and few enough Indians.  The sanctity of marriage, street cars and Indians in Austin, Texas are all a bit safer today because of the wisdom of Texas voters, the forced migrations of Texas Indians who survived the invention of Colt firearms, to Oklahoma, and the automobile.

Jack

Evening blogsters:

I managed to get home without picking up a carton of smokes from the Rez the other day.  Ran through a partial can of Bugler that had been lying around here for just such an emergency, but it spang ran out.

The question is, do I make my decisions, or do smokes make my decisions for me.  Am I going to be ruled by habit and drive ten miles down this mountain just for tobacco?

Of course not!

Instead, I’m digging around in the garbage cans and ashtrays for snipes with a little left on the end, rolling up tea, coffee grounds testing them for smokability.

I’m not a man gonna be ruled by stupid habits.

Jack

Hi blogsters:

I hadn’t thought about my old running buddy, Phil, for a while.  That last blog entry got me chewing on thoughts of him.  I’ll tell you a bit more about him.

Phil went to the Marine Corps as the result of being a 17 year old driving from Temple, Texas, to Austin with a case of beer in the car.  A Williamson County Sheriff Deputy stopped him on a tail light violation, asked for his drivers license and saw the case of beer.  Old Phil, being a clever youth, gave the officer a Texas Drivers License with an altered date of birth, so’s to keep from being arrested as a minor in possession of alcoholic beverages.

The deputy wasn’t fooled.  He hauled Phil off to the slammer to reflect on his sins.  He was offered the alternatives of going to prison for presenting a phony ID, or going into the US Marine Corps.

In Vietnam, at least, Phil was old enough to drink.  He became Marine Recon and a sniper.  Phil was in the jungle with a squad of other snipers surrounded by a NVA rocket launching unit when the first rockets were fired into Da Nang AFB, though the squad wisely stayed hidden and didn’t take any shots, they radioed in the location of the rocket unit and brought an airstrike down on top of themselves.

They’d be dropped into an area where the NVA was expected to set up a battalion or division headquarters, sit there a couple of weeks waiting quietly, and try for a head shot at a senior officer.  Once the shots were fired they’d try to sink back into the bushes until things went quiet, then slink out to some place where they could be lifted out.

Phil did two tours over there.  When he came back he had such a chest full of medals they snatched him up for Nixon’s Honor Guard.  Which Phil believed would be easy duty.

Instead, it was riot control.  Wherever Nixon went there were anti war riots, and Phil and his unit busting heads, which he thoroughly hated, since he agreed with the demonstrators.

Phil hated politicians, hated war, hated the men responsible for sending him over there and making him the troubled, rage filled human being he was during the decade and a half I knew him.

But the Vietnamese body counts were a lot higher because of Phil.

When I last saw him half his face was eaten away by Lupus, contracted as a result of Agent Orange in those jungles.  The Veterans Administration was fighting and squirming denying all those guys were ill from Agent Orange, that the problems were Service Connected, so they’d have to offer disability and whatnot.

Phil used to observe that he might have been a lot better off if he’d just let them send him to prison for the beer and phony ID.  Then they couldn’t have even drafted him for that place.

I wonder if that old Agent Orange has killed him yet.  Another victim of friendly fire with a delayed action fuse.

Jack