After Batshit and the Ferry we head off, first to pick up her boyfriend, she shows me the rocks around their house, then grab a 6 pack of beer and we're off...
Everything here, all these local hikers and nature enthusiasts, they need their beer or vodka or brandy or ganja to get them through, only the tourists are sober...
First stop we head to Riondel, up the east shore...
The old mine adit, filled with Debris...
explore around the one adit, then down to another by the old ferry landing...
This one, it's fantastic, a hundred foot cliff, the base of which is filled with debris, climb the small hill (sharp, jagged rocks - careful not to spill your beer!) and you find a lip that drops fifty feet into the entrance, and this entrance, choked as it is with rocks, is not entirely blocked, bats flit about the entrance and you know this mine goes deep, many kilometers, below the level of the lake, and there's the promise of great adventures ahead, when we can return with flashlights (and somehow I'm thinking maybe more sober companions, underground things can get dangerous).
From here back, but I've just missed the ferry, and so they take me to the Crystal Beach, a "local" spot - old smelter and workings, the crushed tailings from the mine strew the beach and if you get down on your hands and knees you can find the bits of quartz crystal that have survived the crushing...
(old smelters)
On hands and knees, by the torchlight of our phones we pass the next hour combing the fine gravel for quartz crystals, the sun has gone down and we're picking them from the slag, my evening's haul:
Fine, delicate, most broken, but some a centimeter long and of excellent clarity, fine raw material for more dexterous and nimble hands than mine...