Listening: Agent Orange explaining a plot point
Mentally Replaying: Some Tori
Desiring: hot chocolate
Enjoying: playing with pictures


We left Hollywood and the land of new dreams and went to the forgotten country where fabulous dreams and tremendous ambition made and broke many men.


It's wondrously beautiful country:





Where it all began was in an area *way* out of the way, where a man named Sutter decided to build a lumber mill to serve Sacramento.



This is rebuilt and obviously the water has been left to return to its natural bed. It's in a teeny tiny town called Columa that seems to have a population of five people, six dogs, four cats, a dozen squirrels and a handful of deer. And MANY plots of land that once had buildings that burned down so many times no one has bothered to rebuild them.


The rush led to dozens of little towns springing up with loads of character.



Columbia has been preserved in part because part has been turned into a park and cars are banned on a couple streets. most of the little towns have a drag that looks like this but with wider streets and more polution.

Tens of thousands of people flooded to California in 1849, mostly by steamship either around South America or through Panama. They were all dreaming of the same thing:




This is gold leaf that sometimes shows up in the mountains, but is incredibly rare. The nugget is intact and the white bits are quartz. At 44lbs. it's the largest nugget of its kind and is therefore considered priceless.


None of them anticipated the rigours it would really take:


Backbreaking patience.

Sliuceboxes, rockers and finally hydraulics were used to tear the land apart in search of gold. And still people came, displacing the natives, the previous conquerors and making enterprisng men, who realized the real gold was in serving the miners, very, VERY rich.