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Jenkinson Lake — Description

This is Jenkinson Lake Waterfall up by Placerville. Granted I think in reality there’s a lot more pines and a lot fewer oaks, but ey, I had a new brush to play with. This is located at a nice big park called Sly Park Recreation Area, and there’s swimming and jet skis and camping and fishing and horsebackrigideng. This is the heart of gold country. Placer is a term used to describe what happens when heavy stuff falls to the bottom of the river and light stuff goes on top. Placerville is a big alluvial deposit that at the very bottom, right next to the bedrock is a ton of gold. So to mine the placer gold way back when, you’d dig up all that sand and dirt in a shovel and dump it in a sluice box, which is just basically a long half-open pipe with ripples on the bottom. Then you run water through your sluice and the ripples create little whorls of water that trap the heavy particles in your sluice and the rest of the particles flow out the other side. You can even blast down huge mountainsides with water jets and run them through enormous sluice boxes to get tons and tons of gold.

As you might imagine, this created a huge problem in San Francisco bay way back when. The gold miners dumped an enormous amount of silt and sand into the rivers that drain out to the bay and it got to bad that it raised the bay about twenty to fifty feet, and they had to dig big ship channels and dredge them so the ships can still make it through. Another major issue was that there’s a lot of mercury in the ground in the bay area. Placer mining would catch a lot of it, but not all, and between that and the natural deposits leaking into rivers, there’s a whole lot of fish that aren’t exactly great ideas to eat. Given the skyrocketing homeless population in California, I’d expect to see more and more cases of mercury poisoning as people catch & fish out of the Guadalupe river (favorite local homeless pastime). Then again mercury used to be used as a treatment for syphilis, and that’s also skyrocketing in California so perhaps it’ll all work itself out in the end. ouch that’s harsh.

anyways Jenkinson lake. Don’t catch a brain eating amoeba .

like Mike did…