Working on the grub stake

Working on an important part of the journey, my chair. Don’t laugh; the older you get, the more your priorities change.

I have a partially pinched nerve in my lower back. The area around the nerve is surrounded by arthritis, so when the area gets aggravated, it presses on the nerve with pain I guarantee you have never experienced.

I just went through an episode that had me crawling around on all fours for a couple of days; my dog loves it. Eventually, the swelling subsides and the trap is reset.

I spent most of my life sitting on a five-gallon bucket, and after some research, I splurged on a high-end camping chair that is compact and lightweight, so spare me the eye roll. The company is Helinox, and I’ll post a video. The model I chose was the Cafe chair, which is a little taller and on sale.

It always amazes me the technological progress we have made over the past 100 years. During the gold rush, they had to chop a tree down and make a chair. YouTube is full of old gold mining towns and videos, and I included a link to just one. There are also a number of videos where people search the desert for lost tourists and miners; common sense says to stay out of the mines, especially when traveling alone.

It makes me ill thinking about the hard work involved in gold mining. The waste or tailings piles are enormous and are mostly dug out by hand using a candle strapped to your head for light. The YouTube video is long, but there is a part where he is standing next to a gold stamp mill, and that is what I am interested in. In 1870, gold was $18 an ounce, so they weren’t interested in small pieces; but at $2000 an ounce, I am. There are literally thousands of these examples. I wonder how their life would have changed with a Gold Monster gold metal detector?