Kent Chamberlain and the River of Treasure

When last we left off, yours truly seemed to be stranded in Denver with no way back.

This was possible to endure. First off, as soon as that Patreon payment went through, I'd be able to leave. Second off, living and driving everywhere in one's RV means the only obstacle to staying somewhere is finding parking. Thanks to years of experience, I know a few places where I can park for the night for free in Denver; some for several nights if necessary. So if I had to, I could wait for the payment.

That seemed suboptimal, however, as my dad would say. For one, the crops I'd left behind were just starting to show their real promise. For another, I really hate not being in control of so fundamental a situation as where I can go.

So I seized upon a better idea: annoying every single cashier on I-70 by paying for gas with rolls of quarters. Before I set out from Omaha this spring, I made sure to get a bunch of quarters, and they had been secreted in the van. The idea was mainly to make laundry day simpler, with an emergency nestegg being the secondary idea.

So I pulled up my road map and determined roughly just how much I could drive. Not only could I get home, but I could even afford to make a tiny sidetrip to the Bryce Canyon area on the way back, as I'd initially hoped to do. I couldn't afford to enter Bryce Canyon itself (apparently that costs $38, because our country has stumbled on the idea of holding our national treasures ransom to its own citizens), but I'd get to see and hike plenty of canyonland around it. So things were beginning to look up. I stowed the map, stowed the sun visor and sun-blocking shirts in the windows that's almost always in place when the van is parked, made for the cheapest gas in Denver, and then set off.

The initial trip through the Rockies west of Denver is always a thrilling one. Nobody's charging $38 (yet, maybe the bipartisan horror of an infrastructure bill will change that) to drive I-70 in the mountains yet, so if you've never done that with your life, consider doing it next vacation. There's a reason the bourgeoisie have snapped up everything they can all along it, and it's not just skiing: the area is itself a national treasure.

But, with bourgeois hipster radio on in the background, this day I happened to notice a big chunk of it burning down. I didn't hear any emergency news on said bourgeois hipster radio, but I did snap this pic on my way by. Apparently they closed and later reopened the interstate after I drove by, a fact I just learned, so that's cool. Timed that well.

I was several hours west of Denver when I felt the call of nature in several different ways. We were crossing and re-crossing the Colorado River newly descended from its mountain snows, flanked by pines standing at attention in a narrow canyon, and the sight was so compelling that I wanted to stop and take pictures. I also had to pee.

So after conducting the latter business at a nearby rest area, I noticed that the Colorado DoT had gone to the trouble of building a hiking path near the riverfront. So I hiked it from one end to the other, happy for the consideration and snapping pic after pic of this amazing canyon as the afternoon starts hinting towards the first glimmering yellows of sunset. And then, looking more closely at the water, I noticed the first glimmering yellows of flood gold.

I haven't researched very much into the history of metallic strikes in Colorado outside of downloading some USGS publications on the subject I haven't read. But I did take the precaution of throwing my gold panning backpack in the van before I left the collective, so I could take the time to pan it out and see if it was really metal. It wasn't like I was in a drastic hurry, so why not pan a beautiful river at sunset?

The rest area in question (I'm not going to directly spell it out, but its identity should be fairly obvious after the picture dump post for this that I'll drop on Wednesday in case anyone's particularly interested in panning it themselves) lies just below the mouth of a creek joining the flow of the Colorado.

I didn't think to pan the creek when I walked up it a little way, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to discover that the ultimate source of the metal in the Colorado at that place was somewhere in that creek. Even as far up the Colorado as we were, it had a strong and large enough current that I doubt any source more than a few miles upstream would be noticeable to an amateur without a metal detector. But a tiny creek can bring metal from dozens of miles away.

I keep saying "metal" and not "gold" because I'm not yet certain that it is gold. I am fairly certain that it is metal; it's shiny and flaky like flood gold. I also know that whatever metal I found, I found several varieties.

Some look reddish-green and I'm pretty sure it's copper; some looks whitish and it's probably either silver or platinum; some looks yellow and it's probably gold. But the sand is also littered with little bits of plastic, which are fairly easy to tell apart from metal.

But because of the presence of plastic, I can't rule out that I've got a whole bunch of plastic with a metal patina. Lots of plastic comes like that: think of the inside of a bag of chips. This is a popular area for camping, for picnics, for kayaking, and for rafting. That's undoubtedly why there's so much plastic here. After getting burned in Las Vegas, I don't want to definitively say anything is anything without being absolutely certain. When my friend can bring a kiln to bear on it, I'll know for certain.

But I am absoutely certain that at least some of what I picked out that day is metal. The pic above resolves the pan better than what I hope is gold, but you can see that I got something. You should also hopefully be able to make out some flecks of shiny still lurking in the sands below.

Everything was absolutely beautiful that day, that moment. I knew I couldn't pan out a whole lot more sand before nightfall, and also that I didn't want to linger here too long. I didn't have a hard deadline to get home, but I knew my plants would be happier the sooner I returned. So I took two things of value with me as I left: a gallon of that sand, to pan out back at the collective, and my memories and photos of a little section of planet Earth in the prime of its glory.

For that reason, I'm not making the location of the potential gold strike too obvious. I think gold panning is probably my favorite new hobby outside of gardening, and I think more people should take it up. I think having a couple of fairly well-known sites where people can get their feet wet (literally, heh, also pic related) is a good thing. I also think that this is definitely one of those fields where if something becomes too well known, it gets ruined. Instead of riotous nature in all its wild glory, you get to pay $38 for a day package to a place where you get to mine your very own gold! And I do not want to play into that. Please do come here and enjoy our beautiful land. Just, do not encourage the bourgeois thieves that think it's theirs. I don't want this beautiful place to become yet another tourist trap.

After I left this rest area, I crossed into Utah and stopped for the night at the rest area just outside Green River. Not as spectacular as the other Utah rest area, but in this instance I think I just parked too far away from the wifi. In the morning, I noticed it was about as pretty as Utah's DoT could've made some waypoint in a trackless desert, but trackless desert is just inherently aesthetically limited.

We'll leave it there for now. I'm not certain when I'll be writing the last entry to this tale, or what Indiana Jones-esque title I'll give it. My weather app is telling me that it's getting hotter every day from here on out, and we're not getting a respite until my birthday a month and a half away. So I may find myself rolling up to town and doing a lot more writing, if for no other reason than that this here BK has air conditioning that I don't have to pay for. I would probably burn more in gas just keeping myself cool than I'd burn driving to town and hanging out here. I've made a couple accommodations at the collective in order to stay cooler with less energy, but they're unproven as of yet and describing them will be its own post. After I'm done with this, I'll write up a post with more pictures from this trip that'll drop on Wednesday. I'll try to write something that'll drop on Friday (once again, I'm in town on a Friday writing this) so hopefully you guys check all that out when it comes out. Thanks for reading, and see you next time.