Not Rich Yet

by Nick Coons
Feb 23, 2005

I was able to out to my gold prospecting adventure last weekend as planned, and the weather was perfect. If anyone can make it stay like that all year long in Arizona

Arizona	(air-i'-ZON-u')
The State of Arizona comprises the extreme south-western portion of the United States. It is bounded on the north by Utah, on the east by New Mexico, on the south by Mexico, and on the west by California and Nevada.

, they'll be rich. Speaking of rich, or rather, not-rich, I am not a millionaire anymore after this trip than I was before. But I did find a few small pieces and had lots of fun.

Most of the pieces that we found were small specks that didn't even seem like they were worth the effort to collect. However, I'm new at this, so maybe those are exactly the things that I should be collecting. I did find a piece of quartz that has one and a half sides covered in a gold-colored substance. It looks too yellow to be iron-pyrite, or "fools-gold," so I plan on having it checked out to verify.

Our metal detector seemed to be malfunctioning most of the time, or perhaps I didn't know how to use it. But I can't imagine that it's supposed to detect metal when it's being directed right into the sky, though I suppose there could have been a super-silent low-flying invisible plane overhead, but I'm going to assume not.

Afterwards, we went to an old goldmine that goes quite a ways back into the Superstition Mountains

Superstition Mountains	(soo-pe'r-STI'-shu'n MAWN-ti'n)
A large mountain range making up the eastern edge of the Phoenix valley.

, at least 100 yards. We didn't originally plan to go here, so we didn't bring any flashlights, and were only able to walk back as far as we could see until it finally became pitch black.

So we started walking back, and heard a small fluttering passing over our heads. A few seconds later, we heard it again. We ducked down as the bats flew from the back of the cave towards the entrance. All we could see was a speck of light off in the distance representing the entrance. We stayed down for about half a minute as we waited for them to calm down. You could see their silhouettes as they flew out the entrance and back in. As soon as the flying seemed to stop for a few seconds, we made a crouching dash for the entrance.

Next time, we'll have to take some good flashlights, and maybe a few tennis racquets.