This Offbeat Life
New Economy Cooking
Backpacking by Bus

If you go looking for old mining towns, bring along a simple $5 baffled gold pan and you, like the Chinese laundry operators, may come home with enough gold of your own to pay for the trip. There is still plenty of gold in them thar hills and you can find it with a little information and a bit of swooshing. And don't forget your sniffer bottle.

GPAA website

Recreational Gold Prospecting

Goldmaps.com on panning:

GOLD PANNING IS FUN
Gold panning is a delightful outdoor recreation for young and old. Many happy families combine gold panning with a picnic by a beautiful stream. It is easy to learn how to pan for gold by following the proven step-by-step instructions printed on your gold map. You are sure to get "gold fever!"

ALL YOU NEED
All you need to pan for gold is a shovel, an old dishpan or a $5 gold pan, a magnifying glass, a pair of tweezers and a small plastic vial in which to put your gold. Gold pans are found at hardware stores, metal detector stores, rock shops and hobby shops.

(Also a good resource for gold maps)

Book Review:
Ghost Towns of the Northwest

review by Leslie Strom

Ghost Towns of the Northwest
by Norman D. Weis

1999 - Caxton Printers, Ltd
312 Main Street, Caldwell, ID 83605-3299

In the Pacific Northwest we know something about boom and bust. The Alaska gold rush, timber, salmon, aircraft and software all have had a roller coaster ride here. Crashing businesses can sell off their Herman Miller office chairs and Xerox machines, but what happens when the railroad passes you by, your gold claim doesn't pan out, or there's no more need for coal? Then you move, lock, stock, and barrel, for a place you can make a living, leaving the husk of your community behind. Ghost Towns of the Northwest by Norman D. Weis will tell you how to find these abandoned places in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.

Ghost towns have a certain magic. Most of the places Weis covers are mining towns, some of them formerly very large. He is a collector of images and histories of these places, and the book is full of anecdotes about the towns and how they look today. Detailed maps will get you there, and narratives will give you an idea if it's worth a visit. Weis, it seems, has never met a ghost town he didn't like, and so there are plenty of unbiased accounts to choose from.

Fascinating bits from wild west history abound in this book. In the chapter about Virginia City, Montana (which is easily visited, now a restored living museum): "The Chinese laundry operators catered especially to the miners. Pant pockets were thoroughly scrubbed, and the wash water then panned. The gold recovered often exceeded the fee charged for washing."

I did have quick look around the internet for ghost towns... one large database of north American ghost towns lists Index, Washington as one. I'm not sure how the authors define ghost town but if you have a fire station, B&B, two streets with names, a small grocery post office, a Sportsmen's Club and a grade school, the town ain't dead yet. Really dinky, sure. But dead? Such thoughtless errors are not made by Weis, who drives dirt roads and talks to the locals and scours the archives to bring us the Real Thing.

Leslie Strom was shocked to find a Starbucks store in Yellow Jacket, Idaho. There was only one latte flavor: chicory.