Flutterby™! : Yesterday in the Gold Country

The original plan this last week was to go travel the length of California Highway 49, in the foothills of the Sierra, and explore the gold country. There are a ton of state and local parks along this path, along with towns that have been standing (or rebuilt continuously) since the mid 1800s, and a whole bunch of fascinating geology.

But Charlene's been having some leg and lower back issues (which have also been keeping us off of the tandem), and I had some things which needed to get taken care of before the end of the month, and the week was suddenly gone.

So yesterday we drove out to Placerville to see what we could find between there and Auburn on 49. The first stop was at Hangtown's Gold Bug Park, Placerville's historic site. It's on a space where, once the placer (surface) deposits were mined out, they dug in, and there are a bunch of fairly deep mines in the area. One of 'em has been set up with electric lights and an audio tour, so we donned hard hats (ya need 'em) and wandered back in. Cool to see all that slate with the seams of gold bearing quartz from the inside, and the audio was decent.

Afterwards we stepped outside for the obligatory gold panning in a trough, where, as usual, we got distracted by all of the other cool things that came out of the gravel, and then wandered across to see their stamp mill exhibit. They've rebuilt the building in roughly the configuration of the original stamp mill on that site, got the stamping mechanism, and a small working model. It's a piece in progress, but overall this park pulled a bunch of things about mining together in a way I hadn't assimilated from the wreckage I've stumbled across elsewhere, and it whet my appetite for further exploration.

After a very tasty lunch in town and some time hanging out at the smaller of the two museums (where we sussed out the workings of an 1890-something soda water making machine, life was very cool in the days pre-microcontrollers and servos), we toodled up 49 to Coloma, where James W. Marshall had designed and was overseeing the building of a sawmill for John A. Sutter when he found gold in the river bed. We wandered around the buildings and the museum and reconstruction of the original sawmill, out to the South Fork of the American River to the original site, where we saw lots of shiny gold flecks (mostly mica and pyrite) in the water.

After a quick stop in Cool, California, we tried to find a reasonable place for dinner in Auburn, didn't get what we wanted, pointed the car west and discovered the 4^th Street Grill in Sacramento. Good food, really good service, and a nice way to cap off the day.