7/23: At the end of the road, there's Hope

Friday July 23, “At the end of the road, there’s Hope”: We woke up to sunny blue skies for the first time! Up a short dead end road was the town of Hope where we spent a splendidly relaxed morning poking around and chatting with locals. Hope was a briefly booming gold mining town a hundred years ago, and now is a collection of dilapidated wood buildings and a few cabins. It sits on the shore of the Turnagain Arm, looking across to the opposite shore and the highway we drove down the afternoon before. There are a few cafes, a painter’s gallery located next to his home, and a friendly museum of mining memorabilia along with some partly restored old buildings. Fei checked out an old cast iron waffle maker sitting on atop a wood-burning stove. All the conveniences of home! A few other tourists parked along main-street, but town was refreshingly low key.

With the advice of a retired forest service guy named Ron, we headed down the road just a little bit in search of gold!!! We thought we might find a campsite at Coeur d’Alene before doing some panning. Instead we found ourselves on a rough and narrow dirt road that became rougher and narrower with every mile. We finally stopped and worried a little about how we would turn around. But it was lunchtime, so we parked at a wide spot and had a nice lunch. Standing outside with binoculars, we scanned the arctic landscape around us. Jenny spotted a brown bear on the mountainside above us! The bear moved slowly, stopping to dig for roots or pick berries, and came in and out of view among the short willows. Sure enough, she had 2 cubs along, and they were little ones - this year’s models.

We got ourselves turned around with some difficulty in the narrow valley, and backtracked down to the Resurrection Pass Trailhead. There, we found a campsite along the river, where the forest service sets aside the riverbanks for tourist panning. Elsewhere in the area, most of the creeks have mining claims and aren’t available for us amateurs. I pulled out a bucket filled with pans, picks, trowels, magnifying glasses and tweezers that I’d put together at home and sat down to review the instructions. Hmm, dig up some stream gravel, put it in the shallow pan, dunk it in the water and slosh everything back and forth. Fei and I worked at it for some time, but looking through the black sand at the bottom of the pan was disappointing. This creek was much too picked over for finding even a tiny piece of gold, I think.