This day was mainly a travel day to get us from Glacier to striking distance of Mount Ranier, but to break up the monotony of the drive we stopped to spend 90 minutes at the Crystal Gold mine in Kellog, MT.
The mine was opened in 1879 and closed in 1881. It was lost until about 10 years ago. When someone bought the land to develop into a trailer park, he found water coming out of the ground. Thinking it might be a hot spring, they dug a little and found the flooded mine. After pumping it out, they found there was still a lot of gold in the mine, stuck between veins of white quartz and hard rock. After mining enough gold to get rich, he turned it into a tourist attraction.
In the picture (above) Tommy is looking at how copper is leaching from the rock and forming grass-like fingers. We thought it was some sort of moss, but in fact it was copper. We saw quartz, iron, gold, silver, and platinum in the rock.
After the underground tour, the folks running the mine take everyone out for an hour of panning gold. They make sure there is real gold in the dirt to be panned. The kids found small flakes, the guys called flower gold. We could have spent all day finding enough of the flower gold to amount to anything, but the kids had fun. It was a nice way to break up the drive before continuing to our hotel in Spokane, WA.