The Further Adventures of Sir Grunty Chicken Caesar

My thoughts tonight aren't that organized. Some family stuff has my neurons a bit tied up--nothing super serious. So I thought that doing a fun post without a lengthy narrative would be better for the both of us.

I was at this place a bit ago. My bro took the photo. It's easy when you can drive to places, so long as it is in a 4x4. My truck does alright. It's just a bit thirsty. Anyway, I'm looking at something I found in the overburden from the ore bin.

I may be a fool, but  I knows gold when I sees it! Albeit, this is a very small 

amount, trapped in rock. 

I also went on some big solo hikes and found more adventure and DEATH CARS!!! Well, this '30s era Chevy truck is dead, but I don't think anybody was killed in it.

I'm pretty sure that this one had blood on it's dash. This is why hiking below old mountain roads is always interesting, and spooky. Speaking of spooky...

This is the first mine that I visited on my hike last weekend. I really, really, didn't want to get wet. That didn't last long....

I am a fool for adventure and so went for a nice wade in this ice cold tunnel. The boys didn't appreciate it much.

I eventually made it to higher, dryer ground and found some cool rails leading the way.

Usually, the ties rot out and the rails come loose in these old mines, but these are still well intact.

This was quite a find: a cast iron, hand-crank winch. I came across this as I was exploring a second mine in the area. I was descending from one level of a mine to this level, which led to another adit (opening).  The vertical shaft that this winch was used for was back filled, fortunately.  I would love to haul this back home and display it out front, but this thing wasn't going to budge--it must have weighed a thousand or so pounds.  The top gear came up to my shoulder, so it's near five foot tall.  The crank was frozen, but that didn't stop me from trying my damnedest to break it free.

This was inside the last mine from last weekend's hike (four total). This is a partial cave in. You can see the timbers nearly giving out while trying to support the stope. Seeing as how I don't have a wife and kids, and my neighbors think I'm uncouth, I figured that if I didn't return it would give them less to talk about in the church correlation meetings. So I went ahead and crawled through my own personal death wish.

This is the view just after I passed through the partial cave in. The opening is not that large--just enough for me to crawl on all fours. You'd like to see that, wouldn't you? Sickos. Anyhooter, I had my sunglasses in my shirt's front pocket. The glasses fell out and down in a crevice. "Balls", I said, "Filthly Dog's Balls!" They were my favorite glasses; they made me feel cool like Fonzie.

These are the fruits of hiking your ass off. This was from an earlier adventure three weekends ago. I went in search of an old mill site.  I found a clearing where it was supposed to be but nothing else, with the exception of one piece of rough cut lumber sticking out of the earth.  You can see the wetlands and Great Stench Lake off in the distance.

 I love beaver. I love dams. I love them, Sam I am.

When I become Bill Gates' beneficiary, I am going to have slaves carve my likeness into this rock. A castle built on the pinnacle would be my next choice.

This is from a hike in April. What you see here is a small clearing where a cabin used to be, way up on the mountain.  The cabin burned down in the '40s after the man who lived there blew up his moonshine still. He had a mine nearby as well, but it was blown up by the forest service. Bastards!

Here are pieces of cast iron from a furnace that I found in the vicinity of the cabin site. I also found some old bed springs and loads of pipe strewn about. I wonder what in the hell possessed the guy to live all the way the hell up there in the first place? Maybe he had church people trying to "correlate" him too.