Biking and Hiking

I'm still biking! A week or so ago I got my friends Dusty and Karen to bike with me from Pringle to Edgemont on the Mickelson Trail, a rails to trails route, approximately 30 miles. Karen posed for me so I could get the camera set up on the bench for our group photo on the trail. It was a beautiful day! The rancher had his hay all baled up along our route and we breezed into Edgemont with nary a flat or problem at all! I am getting excited for the big bike ride -350 miles - we start the end of August!

The next group of pictures is from an amazing adventure Ron and I had last Friday. We decided to prospect for gold at a new claim that our club has just gotten, south of Spearfish in Beaver Creek. This is really wild country and we knew we would have to hike down a pretty steep hill to the creek below. So I studied the topo maps, located our target area on the GPS, and decided to hike in where a tributary ran into the stream, thinking that it wouldn't be so steep if we could stay in that draw. I brought lunch, a gold pan, classifer, garden scoop and hooked screwdriver, thinking that I could get gold flakes out of bedrock cracks and pan it out. Ron brought his metal detector because we had heard this place is known for nuggets in the bedrock. We parked the truck at the top of the hill and found an abandoned road that looked like it paralleled the tributary. We started hiking but things went south as soon as the road petered out. The tributary had so many tangled bushes and fallen trees that it was impassible and we decided to hike across the steep hillside which also was covered with fallen trees and poison ivy. When we reached the bottom, there was no water! I took a couple of pictures of where we were, tuned up the GPS and figured out where we were, and sure enough we were in the stream but no water! So Ron metal detected and I dug some dirt out of the bedrock where he was finding targets and put it into big baggies and into my backpack, to pan out when I got home. The clouds started gathering, so we decided to start hiking out around 1 pm - all of Ron's targets were just junk, no gold, but he hadn't even gotten a good start. The hillside was so steep that I was hanging on to bushes and tree trunks to pull myself up the hill - 700 feet of that, I found out later! I couldn't find the faint road we took earlier, so using the GPS we bushwacked through the forest out to the main road. I think if I hadn't marked the truck's coordinates on the GPS, we'd still be wandering around in the forest . . . . As soon as I washed off the poison ivy oil from my legs (I was dumb and wore shorts) it started thundering and sprinkling rain. So we got out just in time - by the time we drove through Sturgis, this was a huge thunderstorm right behind us and hammered the motorcyclists with egg-sized hail balls, although we missed it because we turned south to go to Rapid City. So I panned out my two nice sized flakes of gold and am still doctoring my poison ivy rash by rubbing it with salt - a remedy I learned from a ranger in California where they fight poison oak! Oh for a good soak in the ocean! Ron says he wants to go back next year, but I am going to find an easier way in, for sure!