2005/06 Alaska Trip - Road West - Heyburn state park |
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Monday June 27th
Monday was a driving day across the rest of Montana. We drove through Helena, Montana’s capital, across the MacDonald Pass to join up with I-90, and then west through Missoula and across the continental divide into Idaho. The valleys are narrow and steep here, so the little mining towns that used to be shaken by all the traffic going through their streets now are in the shadow of the freeway going overhead. Neither is very attractive.
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Idaho (Heyburn and Emerald Creek) |
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After a day of drizzle and heavy rain, we went south on a winding back road through the pretty lakes country around Coeur d’Alene to Benewah Lake in Heyburn state park, the closest 
campground we could find to the Emerald Creek mine. We were a very tight fit, perched on a hill amongst the trees. We had our first showers (luke-warm to cold) and electricity for the trip, and found out that the trailer’s GFCI had broken. The GFCI is a device to protect you from electrocution when working with electricity outside. Ours was permanently protecting us by allowing no current at all. Fortunately it can be easily wired around.
I went for a damp walk along the lake and encountered this pileated woodpecker. I didn’t have the right lens with me so it’s a bit fuzzy, but you can see the distinct resemblance to Woody Woodpecker.
Tuesday June 28th
Next morning I went looking for the woodpecker again, this time with the right lens, but instead I heard a sound like a dozen demented chickens in the treetops. I bushwhacked up to the top of the ridge and found an osprey nest with young, but the noise was actually coming from a colony of great blue herons. As ospreys and herons both only eat fish and frogs, I guess they can coexist together, but it must be noisy for the ospreys.
Whoever named Emerald Creek must have been colour-blind, as it’s actually a good spot to mine for garnets, which are usually red. The digging site is on a logging road and the dig is managed by the Forestry Service, who sold us a mining permit. The garnets are a few feet down in the clay along the creek, so mining involves digging out the clay and washing it to look for garnets. Of course, the pits fill up with rainwater, so the digger is knee-deep in a water and clay mix, and 
rapidly gets covered head to foot with clay. It’s also difficult to move around in the pit because 
of the suction effect. It rained a few times while we were digging, but once you’re in the pit, rain doesn’t seem to matter much! We were quite successful with a couple of ounces of garnets.