Where in the US is Fire Team McBean? : March 2015

Wow, our time in Sacramento is passing so quickly! We were stationed here from 2004-2008, so we are blessed to have great friends as well as some family here. We haven't been back since moving to Fort Carson, so our priority has been to spend as much time as possible with as many of them as possible. In our spare time, we've been studying the California Gold Rush. As part of our unit study we spent an afternoon in Coloma at the site where James Marshall first found gold on the American River. The area has since been turned into the 80 acre Marshall Gold Discovery Park.

The park has a one room museum with artifacts from the 1840's and static displays of James Marshall finding and panning for gold, as well as some information and displays about the local Native American community.

We were fortunate to stumble into the park on Living History Saturday (the 2nd Saturday of the month), where the park has several docents and volunteers do demonstrations of things like basket weaving, dutch oven cooking, and other tasks that were essential to life in the 1840's.

Ms. Jan was a sweet lady who answered a million questions about basket weaving for the kids. When Patton correctly identified the bird that had provided the feathers for one of the baskets she had on display she was thoroughly impressed and a quick friendship was struck.

The museum provided interesting information, but the meat of the park is in exploring the grounds. A few of the original buildings have been preserved and several have been replicated, as have several pieces of machinery.

A simple sluice box

A replica of a miners cabin

Grinding stones

One of the early methods of extracting gold from quartz was to attach horses to this piece of machinery which used the grinding stones to grind the quartz.

A water cannon used for hydraulic mining. We learned on our visit that the concept of hydraulic mining was actual born in Mexico.

An ore cart.

Stamp Mill

Randomly, a pretty purple tree.

One of the out buildings was a mini museum that provided more information on the actual mining process. The tunnel connected two rooms and reminded us all of Pioneer Park!

Several of the original rocks had chain link still in them.

There was a large population of immigrants from China who came to mine for gold. In China California was called "Gold Mountain". This is one of the original buildings in the park and it served the Chinese community as a bank, store, and gathering place.

Patton is reading the informational sign about Grandmother Rock, the rock where the Native Americans would come to grind acorns.

See those holes? They're the result of the centuries of grinding acorns.

Bark houses were the shelter of choice for the local Natives.

The Munroe Family, original owners of the land that the park now stands on.

It was SO hot!

St. John's Catholic Church. This was the first church built to serve this community. The Munroes and several well known miners are buried in the cemetery behind it.

Emmanuel Church

As an added bonus when you visit the park, you get to mark "California's Shortest State Highway" off of your bucket list.

The view from the Marshall Monument

The Marshall Monument. The statue is holding a gold nugget and pointing to the spot on the American River where Marshall first found gold.

The Coloma Bridge

When the sun started to dip behind the hills (the El Dorado Hills) we decided to head down to the American River to see if we could find any of Marshall's Gold. We didn't find any, but we had a great time splashing around in the river and trying to identify the rocks we did find. We were able to bring home several large pieces of quartz that I'm sure will meet a hammer some time this week.

During our visit we learned a few interesting facts that had either not been presented or had not been presented in their entirety in the reading we had done up to that point.

To start, Marshall's discovery of gold on the American River was not the first gold to be found in California. Gold had been already been found in Southern California, but the prospectors had been able to keep their find quiet.

Marshall and the men working with him tried to keep their find secret as well, but their discovery was revealed by Sam Brannan. Brannan was an elder in the Mormon Church. When he arrived in Coloma a few of the Mormon men prospecting their offered him a portion of their gold as a tithe. This was the gold that he took to San Francisco and presented to the masses. This is what actually kicked off the California Gold Rush. As for San Francisco, it was described as being a ghost town in the late 1840's.

Obtaining information like this, that you would not normally find in a cursory study of a place or an event, is by far the best part of being able to visit places first hand.

By the end of the day the Fire Team was filthy, exhausted, and ready for their next adventure, so keep an eye out to see what we're up to this week!

We did it! We finally left the Pacific Northwest! We've been so busy that I haven't had time to update this blog, and I realized today that if I don't update it now then I'm going to fall far behind and never really catch up so here's a quick summary of our trip so far. (Disclaimer: this post is likely to have more photos than words, and I can't promise that those photos will be in chronological order, but please enjoy them anyway).

From Athena we made a pit stop in Shaniko, a tiny little ghost town on I97. It's just a little ghost own in the high desert, but it's the perfect place to stretch your legs.
We spent the night in Bend. When we first started planning this trip we decided that we didn't want to be driving more than about four hours a day and we chose to stop in Bend for no other reason than that we it is about four hours away from Athena. Everything we planned for Bend seemed to end up a bust. A couple of the things I wanted to do (Lava Caves and Newberry National Volcanic Monument) were closed for the season, and the chocolate shop we visited ended up not living up to their online reviews. We did fit in a trip to Barnes and Noble, though, and that always makes for a good day. It was a deflating start to the road trip, but it didn't take long for things to turn around.

The next day we visited Crater Lake National Park. If you've been there you know that there aren't many words that I could use that would do the lake justice and if you haven't been there, please promise yourself now that you'll put it on your to-see list because there really are no words. The lake was formed when Mount Mazama blew up, collapsed, and left the deepest lake in the United States where it stood. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that, but you can find out all about it on your visit. The lake is a beautiful dark blue and we were fortunate to see against the backdrop of a beautiful blanket of snow which made for a really breathtaking view. Crater Lake is really secluded in the south central area of Oregon, so there's not much but for the lake and the expected outdoor activities, but even if that's not usually your thing, I promise you will not regret taking the time to visit.

After an unplanned stay in Cave Junction, Oregon, which might be the weirdest town I've ever been in, we finally crossed the state line into California!

We spent a night just over the border at the Panther Creek Campground before heading over to Crescent City and further down Hwy 101 to Trinidad. Crescent City was a wonderful beginning to California. We got lost on our way to Ocean World, an aquarium we planned on visiting to kick off our marine life unit study, and happened upon Battery Point Lighthouse. The lighthouse itself was closed because of the season, but we were still able to explore the grounds and take advantage of the gorgeous views. We realized quickly that getting lost that morning was the coolest thing that could have happened because we were able to watch a pod of grey whales migrating. None of us had ever seen whales before, so this was a super cool thing all of us.
Unfortunately, this is where my four day old camera decided that it was going to stop working, and so it's also where the pictures get a lot more sporadic and not quite as fun (at least for me).
We did finally make it to Ocean World that afternoon where we saw great examples of what lives in the Pacific Ocean, petted sharks, and discovered that Rogue Scout is deathly afraid of pirates. Even plastic ones that are missing a hand.
In Trinidad we had the first of our California reunions when Jay and James came to spend a couple of days exploring the local beaches and state parks with us. Before parting ways the eight of us made the short drive to Gold Bluffs State Beach where we hiked Fern Canyon.
When the Glenn boys headed back to Redding we headed further south, this time anchoring in my favorite little fishing village -- Fort Bragg. There are a lot of little towns on the California coast that are like Fort Bragg, but we have an emotional attachment to the little town where I vacationed in my youth and John and I spent each of the anniversaries that we lived in California. We spent five days there and most of that time we spent on the beach. We collected sea glass at Glass Beach, explored the tide pools at McKerricher State Beach, and threw out crab pots in Noyo Harbor.
Our time on the coast has been a great transition to life on the road, but we aren't going to get far if we don't pull anchor and leave, so we are spending one last night at our favorite camping spot in Albion (where John is currently boiling the fresh crab he caught this evening!) before heading on to Sacramento and so many reunions that we have been looking forward to!

(So, I wrote all of this last week intending to upload the pictures the same day. Obviously that didn't happen. We're in Sacramento now, enjoying the abundant sunshine and our awesome friends. We have some cool field trips planned for the next couple of weeks and I promise I'll try to post more regularly!)