The Gold Cone

150th anniversary of Baker County gold discovery

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 17:21:55 +0000

I saw this article in the Oregonian by Terry Richard, read the whole article there for the videos, images, related links and comments. It is very interesting.

Eureka! Ken Foster found gold.

The North Carolinian had to drive all the way to Oregon’s Blue Mountains to find it, but there it was: sparkles in the pan.

"We can only keep three specks, so keep the biggest pieces, Hon," he said to Dianne, his wife. "We’ve tried to pan gold before, but never found any."

While traveling the Oregon Trail on vacation last summer, the Fosters were doing some recreational gold panning at Sumpter, the old mining town in the mountains above Baker City where summer tourists flock to get their Western fix.

Bringing a bit of the old West to life is what Sumpter does best. Winthrop, with its faux-Western theme, does it too in Washington, but Sumpter has evolved without adopting a theme and maintains an aura of an authentic Western mining town.

The Fosters were panning with equipment provided by Sumpter Valley Dredge State Heritage Area, where the park ranger whispered a secret.

Yes, there is plenty of gold to be found in the Elkhorn Range around Sumpter, but this particular panning opportunity is a setup. To guarantee that park visitors take home some sparkle, ranger Miranda Krane buys gold and adds bits to gravel in the sluice box. Thus the reason for the three speck limit.

Regardless, the gold was a good souvenir and helped make the Fosters’ day.

For the second time.

The Gold Rush Bandit Train Robbery had already made their day that morning.

"Without a doubt that robbery was even more memorable," said Ken, a retired engineer for General Electric. "I took as many pictures as I could, to show the folks back home."

The old gold rush town of Sumpter nestles on the opposite side of the Elkhorns, the highest range of the Blue Mountains, from Baker City. Sumpter’s main business district is all of four blocks long, just off Oregon 7.

Despite a permanent population of only 283, Sumpter entertains enough travelers to have a gas station, laundry, a handful of convenience and collectibles stores, lodges and RV parks, restaurants and watering holes, plus a good local museum. Camping is not far from town in the national forest.

Sumpter also has a day-use state park in town, whose main feature is the big old mining dredge that sits where it stopped production in 1954. There are only three or four like it in such good condition left in the West.

Sumpter is also the end-of-the-line station for a seven-mile narrow-gauge passenger steam train that operates on summer weekends, the town’s big tourist draw on summer weekends.

Homes in the woods off Mill Street, many smartly kept, are occupied by retirees or used as second homes. Sumpter’s elevation of 4,424 feet makes summer more bearable than in the heat of Baker Valley.

Ponderosa pines climb the hillsides of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest above town. The forest encircles the private land on the floor of the Powder River Valley where Sumpter was built.

150 years to celebrate

Sumpter Valley Railway keeps vintage trains on trackThe Sumpter Valley Railway is open weekends and holidays Memorial Day through the last weekend in September. Vintage trains operate between McEwen and the historic mining town of Sumpter where gold is still found in local streams.Watch video

The foundation for the town was laid 150 years ago this summer, when two prospectors from South Carolina found color in Cracker Creek, the first gold discovered in Baker County. Sumpter will celebrate the sesquicentennial of gold this year during its holiday flea markets and other civic events.

The Confederate sympathizers named the place Fort Sumter, in honor of where the Civil War started the previous year back home. The name was later tweaked at the behest of the Post Office.
Mining kept the town going until the railroad arrived from Baker City in 1896. Before long the population had swelled from 300 to 4,000 as freight trains carried timber and ore for processing in Baker City and elsewhere.

Sumpter had two cigar factories and 16 saloons during the height of the gold rush. But when the fire of 1917 torched 12 city blocks, most residents decided to leave because the mines were playing out. Soon, the only mining left was done by the first of three dredges.

The third and last dredge began service in 1935. It closed during World War II, then resumed production until shutting for good in 1954. At 125 feet long, 52 feet wide and weighing 1,250 tons, the dredge looks like a river steamboat with a bucket line and a stacker out the back. The behemoth floated on the pond it dug as part of its operation.

Buckets on a conveyor belt up front scooped gravel, which got sorted for valuable ore as it was passed through the interior and washed out the back. Tailing piles cover the valley floor to this day, ruining what could be productive ranchland but offering good wildlife habitat.

An operating dredge was pretty much a nuisance, especially at night when it sounded like a pack of coyotes howling and was lit up like a small town. Preserved in the state park, dredge No. 3 continues to undergo restoration, but there is no way to make it operate again.

Miners and merchants

There are other ways to find gold at Sumpter these days. Some open a business, though they are hard-pressed to strike it rich that way, or buy a mining claim.
Sandra Chase at Rustic Realty said mines go up for sale all the time. Some include the land, others just the mineral rights, with prices ranging from $25,000 to $625,000.

"Mostly it’s just the average Joe who walks in the door with enough money to buy a claim he can play on," she said. "It’s mainly for recreation. We don’t hear much about striking it rich because the ore has to be processed somewhere else."

A couple from Salem went the other route. They opened a collectibles store, Maxfield Originals, while maintaining careers in the Willamette Valley. They keep the business afloat by being in Sumpter during flea markets and on the third weekends of summer months.

"We love it here and plan to retire here," Randy Maxfield said. "There’s no I-5 and no I-205. It’s all about peace and quiet and deer grazing in your yard."
Myron Woodley is covering both bases, gold and business. Despite being in his mid-70s, he works a hard day on his mining claim, then tends bar at night in his Miners Exchange tavern. He’ll sell you a can of Pabst, but give you a free look at the 170 silver dollars mounted in his bar.

Soda Mountain is Sumpter’s pet and book store, owned by LeAnne Woolf. She moved back home from Seattle to sell bird cages, dog treats and books by regional authors.

For grub, visitors and residents frequent the Elkhorn Saloon, with its menu of 42 hamburgers, including peanut butter and sand dunes flavors. Breakfast is equally tasty at Scoop-n-Steamer Station, where a chef’s special "garbage omelet" goes for $9.95.

The Scoop-n-Steamer also rents cozy modern log cabins, but the place across Mill Street is more likely to catch the eye of someone looking for a bed.
The Sumpter Stockade Family Motel looks like a fort left over from the days when gold miners needed protection, but its overnight rooms are as comfortable as the ones guests left at home.

The Lynn Bean Gallery has moved out of the stockade across Mill Street this spring. The gallery showcases the painted ponies by the nationally known painter, who lives part of the year in Sumpter.

Visitors may not always find gold in Sumpter, but they usually experience a Eureka moment.

Dan Aguayo/The Oregonian

Sumpter travel nuggets

Getting there: Sumpter is about 30 miles west of Baker City, via Oregon 7. Baker City is 304 miles east of Portland on Interstate 84.

Events: Four-day-long Flea Markets take place over Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day weekends. These bring lots of people to town. The other big event is Music in the Meadows (Aug. 18). The 150th anniversary of the discovery of gold will be celebrated at all Sumpter events this year. The Geiser Grand Hotel (geisergrand.com) in Baker City plans a number of events around Sumpter Valley Railway Weekend, coming up May 19-20.

Train: The Sumpter Valley Railroad, a passenger-carrying steam train, operates weekends and holidays, May 25 to Sept. 30 this year. It also has a fall foliage weekend (Oct. 13-14) and Christmas trains. It makes two runs daily, three on holidays. Price is $16 for adults; 800-523-1235,sumptervalleyrailroad.org.

Dredge: The Sumpter Valley Dredge State Heritage Area is open for day use May through October. The nearest state park campground is Bates, 20 miles west, which opened last year; 800-551-6949; oregonstateparks.org.

Where to stay: In Sumpter, motel-type accommodations are at the Depot Inn (800-390-2522,thedepotinn-sumpter.com), Sumpter Stockade (541-894-2360, sumpterstockade.net) and Scoop-n-Steamer (541-894-2236, scoop-n-steamer.com). Rates range from $65 to $95. In Baker City, the historic Geiser Grand Hotel (geisergrand.com) has rooms starting at $79.

More info: Baker County Chamber of Commerce, 800-523-1235, visitbaker.com; also,sumpter.org, historicsumpter.com, basecampbaker.com.

So Much Life on a Little Patch of Earth

John — Mon, 07 May 2012 03:03:19 +0000

This article from the NYTimes struck me as Gold Prospecting 101. There are a lot of related articles and links on there web site, so head over and find out what is in your backyard, and what minerals you have access to easily. This author was focused on living creatures, but you and I know there is Gold in them thar backyards.

Merrill Peterson

Oecophora bractella, left, a moth native to ancient forests in Europe, was first seen alive in North America on Carol Kaesuk Yoon’s living room window. A clutch of house sparrow eggs were found abandoned in her birdhouse.

By CAROL KAESUK YOON

Published: April 23, 2012

BELLINGHAM, Wash. — I’ve logged thousands of miles to catch a glimpse of one exotic creature or another, to Costa Rica to be dazzled by the bird known as the resplendent quetzal, to Hawaii to admire sea turtles, to Venezuela to spy man-eating anacondas. So it seemed more than a little odd that the one time I made a sighting worthy of a scientific publication, I was looking out of my living room window.

Robert Goldstrom

This window does not face onto pristine wilderness. It looks at my neighbor’s bathroom window. My street in this small former mill town is crowded enough that when someone sneezes in a backyard, the person next door is likely to say “gesundheit.”

Yet out of that window — actually on the window — I saw a creature that I would later learn had never before been seen alive anywhere in North America. It was a tiny moth less than half an inch long, with elegant forewings held tentlike over its back, each painted in fluorescent yellow, iridescent blue, and black. All I knew was that my husband, Merrill Peterson, who is an entomologist at Western Washington University, ought to go out and catch it with his net, which he did.

After several weeks of reading and e-mailing scientists near and far, some of whom would become his co-authors on a publication about the moth, Merrill learned it was Oecophora bractella, a denizen of Europe’s woodlands and a species rare throughout most of its range, even considered threatened in some areas.

It was the sort of sighting we knew would never happen at our house again. Until Merrill came across another species in the backyard — one that had never been seen on the West Coast — a relative of wasps and bees known as a sawfly. And the list of unexpected species that have shown up, sometimes actually on our doorstep, has only grown longer.

It was enough to prompt us to ask if there was something really special about our home, something ecologically unique. But if I invited you over for a look at our unassuming little yard, I think you would come to the same conclusion that we did. There simply is not.

It’s true that our part of northwestern Washington, also known as the Fourth Corner, is the entry point for goods, people and vehicles coming from points north and west. We are quite likely to reap more than our share of the whirlwind of introduced species that humanity has been rapidly sowing around the globe. But most of the unexpected species on our list have not come as part of some wave of foreign invasion.

So what exactly is going on? The very same thing, I’d guess, that is going on at your house and everyone else’s. Any patch of earth, large or small, turns out to be a mad surprise party of species — fluid, unpredictable and wild — and a microcosm of what is happening and has always been happening around the corner and around the globe.

In fact, probably what is the oddest about the living things on our property is the inordinate amount of attention, bordering on the bizarre, that we have paid them. This obsession stems, in large part, from a decision I made one winter solstice.

On that darkest, deadest day of the year, I decided to try to document and tally every species at our house. I was supposed to be finishing a long-overdue book, a process that makes every other potential project seem fascinating and urgent. I knew there was (and, in fact, still is) no spot on earth for which a complete species inventory has been accomplished, even with the help of millions of dollars and teams of international experts. In other words, the task was beyond impossible. But I had a book to finish, so I started anyway.

A species tally is an entirely different lens through which to see your daily life, and it leads immediately to one burning question: Which species should count? Does a bird spotted in the neighbor’s yard count? What about the species of fir tree that was used to make the window trim? Can you count a species if it leaves behind nothing but scat or bite marks?

I set ground rules in an effort to capture the essence of what made up the life within our lives. Any species made the list, whether it showed up as a whole organism or just a part, whether it was in the yard or house or nearby, as long as it could be seen or heard or smelled or its presence could otherwise be detected from our property.

The vast and ever-changing diversity of our home quickly came into focus as Merrill and I and our two children began reeling off what we’d seen. There were Homo sapiens for sure, the raccoons that got into the crawl space, the meal moths that haunted the pantry, the hummingbird that flew in the window, the enormous spiders that prowl the basement laundry room every winter, and of course the range of creatures that have been our companions over the years, including dog, tortoise, rubber boa, garter snakes, gecko, scorpion and beetles.

I peered into the refrigerator. There sat parts of species of every sort and variety — more than I could begin to count in the condiments alone! I was floored by that infinitude of life and by the fact that it changed each week as we unloaded groceries.

Our unimpressive lawn became a kaleidoscope of mysteries, just one square foot of it boasting multiple species of grasses, one species of dandelion, countless other unknown plants that quickly came and went, and no end of insects, algae, mosses, worms, bacteria and fungi.

Every beam of slanting light, every breath of wind, every flitter of movement revealed something unseen. A droplet of rain splashed on the deck, a potential marvel of aquatic life. A newly noticed stain on the fence proved to be a burgeoning lichen. A squirrel ran into the yard and paused to scratch itself, prompting Merrill to yell out: “Squirrel fleas! New yard species!”

And it was clear that many more species were going by— in the night sky, in a robin’s intestine, hiding under a leaf, silently creeping past — that we were missing entirely.

In hopes of seeing more, I installed a device known as a dripper, which creates the plink-plink sound of fresh water that is supposedly irresistible to many bird species that would never deign to visit a seed or suet feeder. Sure enough, as the spring migration moved through, gorgeous jewel-colored species known as warblers, of a sort we’d never seen in our yard, dropped right out of the sky to drink, bathe and frolic.

Amazed by these visits, we began to fantasize about what else we could bring in by displaying other enticing items — cut fruit, fresh steaks, rotting fish, a chattery bird, a live mouse. Out of respect for our neighbors, not to mention the feelings of the chattery bird and the mouse, we opted against hanging anything but laundry on the laundry line. Still, we wondered what we might be missing. A peregrine falcon? A snowy owl? The cougar that hadn’t been seen on the street since it stalked the newspaper carrier several years ago?

One night, Merrill hung up a black light, which uses the same bulb that gives that magical purple glow to black velvet posters. It also attracts insects, and by morning a whole new world of nocturnal life was revealed to us. The attached trap held many more species of moth than we had seen before. There was even a water boatman, an insect named for the canoelike body with which it paddles about in streams or ponds — even though there was neither stream nor pond near us.

I wish I could give you a bottom-line species count, but I can’t. Living organisms are reliably, inspiringly unpredictable, as any birdwatcher can attest; in years of watching, we have seen many species only once, so it is very likely we have missed many more. And though we are good at spotting birds and insects, we are nearly plant-blind, so who can say what botanical change has been afoot here? The same is true for the many, many microscopic things we literally cannot see.

And that moth that I was the first to see alive in North America? Actually, I’m virtually certain I wasn’t the first. It was the first live Oecophora to be identified on this continent, perhaps, but others had been found dead in traps and live ones were spotted elsewhere soon after. In fact, earlier on the very day that Merrill caught the moth at our house, my daughter’s friend pointed out a colorful moth that might well have been Oecophora. For those, like children, with eyes open wide, rarities can abound.

On any given day, of course, you’re not likely to spot an unexpected guest. But one day it will happen. While you slice a grapefruit or fold laundry or sit at the computer, something unbelievable will be creeping or flittering through your life. Look for it, just in case.

Which Countries Have the Most Gold?

admin — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:18:48 +0000

Why can’t Motomethod be in my neighborhood?

John — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 03:34:49 +0000

Motomethod Community Motorcycle Repair Shop in Vancouver, BC is a full repair shop, for nearly all makes and models of motorcycles, old or new. Motomethod is the first in the industry to allow the rider to come in and ‘rent a bay’ and repair their own bike, or learn how.
http://motomethod.com/

National Geographic Expeditions: From Boom Town to Ghost Town

John — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:13:05 +0000

View Larger Map

And as Jeffrey City is one of the GoldCone’s Crack Marketing Team and Staff’s Favorite Locations I found this link off the National Geographic Expeditions Site: From Boom Town to Ghost Town.

In order to fully understand the geographic concept of natural resource use, students should learn about the ways that resource extraction affects the physical and human landscape. In this lesson, they will discuss how a specific economic activity in a region can facilitate the creation of towns, which often turn into ghost towns if the economic activity ends.