Travels, Visit in LA, 2009

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When I got back to LA, I started working on packing my stuff for the move to Hawaii. I went to the Lake Elsinore post office to mail a package to my brother (as I wouldn't be visiting him as soon as thought) and drove past Lake Elsinore (here and above). It is the largest natural lake in California. It was also a couple of miles further South to the town of Lake Elsinore from the development where James and Szaron live (they were pioneers for an area that is now growing dramatically.	=0=
On Memorial Day Weekend we visited Julian, CA, a town in Southern, CA which has focussed on preserving its historic buildings. Just outisde of town they have a tour of an old gold mine. Here are pictures from the tour. My camera battery was low (Doh!) so I took these pictures with my phone. They would crush the ore in the machine above and then run it over mercury to absorb the gold (here). They would then evaporate the mercury (distilling it back for reuse as mercury is expensive) to leave the gold. They would then run the ore through a machine with water to do automated panning to get more out. The whole process would get about 98% of the gold that was present in the ore. They could process about a ton of ore in a day and would get a few ounces. Enough to pay peoples' salaries, but no one really got rich from these mines in Southern California. Below is picture of a smaller machine they used to crush small amounts of ore so that they could 'assay' it to determine if it was worth mining. Also below is a king snake which we saw on the walk back to town.
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Just before we got to Julian there had been a car which had driven into a bank just below it in the parking lot, shown above. As we were leaving, there was a man arriving to at least cover over the hole left after they pulled the car out (shown here).	=0=