Visiting Sutter's Mill Site

A couple days were set aside to visit the old site of Sutter's Mill near Coloma, CA en route to Gold Beach Oregon for a two month gig. This site was a logging mill but they unexpectedly found gold pieces of gold in their mill chute which in turn led to the California gold rush. Discovered in 1848, created a boom town by late in the year 1848. In less than a year the easy gold was found and by "49" there was still a tremendous draw for miners but the actual gold at the Mill was on a down hill slide. So "The 49ers" spread out and found gold all over California....and you probably know the rest of the story.

On the day we visited the site which is now a state park, there were hundreds of school kids traipsing all over the place but the town sites were mostly closed. A few of the kids got a "panning experience" at one of the original sites but many were relegated to the stream that fed the mill. The former was "salted" with gold. The latter was pretty much void of gold in the surface layers that were allowed to be panned in the "hands and pans" rules of the river. Since we were there with our pans in hand we joined in the fun and helped some of the kids learn some panning skills. A good time was had by all.

The slide show feature still has not been returned to Blogger so selected still shots is all ya get. Sorry about that!