LOL Haven’t thought about Ma and Pa Kettle in ages!
The rocks I got from Cherokee—I painted one as a ladybug for each of my sister’s and brother’s families and one for ours and my parents. I put the date and family vacation on the bottom. They loved tehm, and it made a nice paperweight sized momento.
We lived in southern Ohio when I was little. I spent endless days rock hunting. Once, I was so involved in rock hunting, I found two that looked like fish. I took them home and showed them to my dad. He busted out laughing. We were always looking for arrowheads, and I had found two perfect ones but I was so involved in “rocks”, I hadn’t even noticed!
North Carolina has some great rocks and gem mines in teh mountains. Nothing but sand and shells on the coast.
Sounds like you had a great time prospecting! I would love to try, but I’m afraid the desert heat would do me in. Isn’t it fun to write about something you love/love to do!
I painted one as a ladybug for each of my sister’s and brother’s families and one for ours and my parents. I put the date and family vacation on the bottom. They loved tehm, and it made a nice paperweight sized momento.<<<
That is exactly what I was talking about, enhance the natural features and bring out the thought.
I can spend hours with a template and rock slabs, looking for the best ‘design/photo’ that is in the rock, so it can be cut and polished.
Lapidary work is fun and it excites me to find the beauty in the rocks.
When I had my shop, I sold the art work of a young lady, who could take the ugliest flat common desert rock and with a few strokes of her brush, paint a desert scene on them.
The smallest ones, she painted birds and desert flowers on and those I set in the findings for jewelry....think I still have one of her bird rock necklaces.
Yahoo has rock painting groups, or did about 10 years ago, I ran across them and joined about 10 years ago, just to read the fun things they were doing.
You have lots of lost treasure stories in your area.
If I remember rightly, Georgia has gold mines.
Shells are almost a lovely as rocks, I collected those for years, still would if I found one.
Prospecting is something that gets into your blood, you will more than likely never find enough to pay your expenses, as the money in mining comes from investors in your dream or scam and not the minerals.
For me, it was healthy, a reason to walk miles, look and see the country.......and talk to God, for he has always kept me safe.
He did not let me get bit by the many rattlesnakes that I so foolishly over looked, once two at eye level, on a rock wall, of course I was looking down and had to have been only inches from them.
He shared so many of his creations with me, that I still do not understand how he did it all.
Yes, it is fun to write about that which you love to do, and for me, to dig out the unknown facts and be able to write about them was the fun part.
A hundred years ago, there was a mail route here that they could not keep going, it went 125 miles to the mining camps on the Bill Williams river, almost to Wickenberg.....
The reason that it was always running late, is that the mail carriers kept going insane.
I went down and camped there several times, considered moving to the area and am sorry that I did not, as few people live there, there is no work.
I took real estate clients with me one time, they took their dogs and all went well, until, as we sat around the camp fire, all of a sudden Joyce said “They didn’t, tell me they didn’t!!!”.
I did not have a clue as to what she was talking about, but soon found out.
Their dogs were ‘working dogs’, from their recently sold horse ranch at Tucson.
The dogs went out, rounded up all the wild horses and wild burros and brought them to camp.
A stampede of them, it was dark, so no counting of the animals but 50 to a hundred or more.
They managed to call off the dogs and get the horses on past the camp.
If you want to read a good book that is accurate, on western ghost towns, get “Ghosts of the Adobe Walls”, by Nell Murbarger.
50 years ago, she camped in all the old mining towns and wrote about their histories and she is accurate, I have gone back and retraced her trips to many of them.
The horse roundup, was at Signal, Arizona, we were camped at the wall of the Cantina in her photo.