Our Whitewater Rafting Experience

The highlight of the week -  we visited OARS for a thrilling white water rafting experience! White water rafting is an exciting activity in which you sit in a strong rubber boat which you paddle manually.  The day started off by getting up early, then driving for around 5 minutes to the meeting spot. Before you go white water rafting you have to watch a safety video and fill out a form. We were told to put on PFD’S, body suits and water jackets. They made it seem like all the possible worst case scenarios were going to happen to you. Nobody fell out but I came close while paddling up front. The water wasn’t too cold but more cold when the wind started to pick up. The best part of the trip was when we went down a 3 ft drop and the whole boat almost flipped! We got to see the Tulomne River and while we were rafting we saw a bald eagle. 

The next day we went to an old fashioned town where we got the chance to go panning and sluicing for gold. We were taught how to properly pan for gold then showed how to work the sluice. A sluice is an artificial channel for a flow of water that is controlled by a valve or gate. This helps speed up the process of finding gold. The way you work a sluice box is by shoveling the bottom of a river into a bucket with a strainer which helps to separate the big rocks and the rest. After that you shovel the stuff that is in the bucket into the sluice. Gold is heavier than most of the things in the bucket which means it can get caught at the bottom of the sluice while most of the other stuff runs off the edge of the sluice. Then you collect all the excess sand and whatnot into a bucket to be panned. You place a basin underneath you pan so any gold that is dropped can be caught. The way you pan is by shaking the pan underwater then slowly rocking the pan back and forwards causing the light materials to fall off, since gold is heavier. Then there is most of the gold. 

 

We ended up finding only about 20 dollars worth of gold and a couple shotgun caskets. Have you ever heard about gold fever? Gold fever isn't actually about being addicted to gold mining. The term actually means getting sick. In the old days people would use cooking pans as pans for finding gold. They would also use a substance called mercury to help find gold by pouring a whole lot of it into a body of water. It will then latch itself onto the gold causing it to be extremely easy to find. Next they would use sheepskin pads to rub the mercury off. But they had to find the gold somehow, so they used pans to pan. That’s why it’s called gold fever. Because after having gold covered in mercury in your cooking pans, they wouldn't always wash it off to well meaning they would die of mercury poisoning. Gold fever.