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there's gold in dem hills...
tahoe98
Posts: 11,388 ✭✭✭
"government is not reason, it is not eloquence-it is a force! like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action." George Washington
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My favorite story is about prospectors in the California Deserts. A little background first...Desert Varnish is not clearly understood; it is a surface deposit that stains some rocks dark, starting with red and going to brown. Over time, the stain becomes black and even can get a metallic sheen. Scientists believe it may have something to due with oxygen, water, manganese, perhaps other minerals. In any case, it can take tens of thousands of years to develop this varnish. Some places the varnish happens relatively fast, sometimes it is slow. Anyway...
Trudging across identical low sandy hills, one day one starving prospector picked up a typical looking black pebble. These black pebbles were covered with the desert varnish that coats so many things out there.
The rock that the prospector picked up was smooth and much heavier than it should have been, and upon digging at the surface with a knife, found it to be a nugget of gold covered with black desert varnish...so that it looked on the surface little different than any other small black pebbles in the desert. The exact location of course has been lost.
If you have ever been out to the desert, there is no shortage of low sandy hills speckled with small black rocks. In fact, i'd say that the California Desert consists of 50% "black pebble land" by volume. It's typically a volcanic thing and those small black rocks are usually aged pumice blown out of a cinder cone.
It makes me laugh inside that one of the gold stories might have some folks checking out every single low hill speckled with black rocks in the desert. That's probably the most common land formation there is out there.
Now tell a story like that...not too far from where this was found in 1977 and you will definitely get some attention!