Meanwhile, waiting for new episodes of "Alone" (*Last episode the Anthropologist released a large salmon back into the wild, she had more than she needed and would need to catch and eat it another day, while the preacher has gone hungry for weeks and is dropping pant sizes, Jose built his canoe and the Sniper climbed the mountain and began moving camp), I've discovered a peculiar sub-niche of youtube. Prospector Porn. Yep, people actually going out and finding stuff. If you metal detect there's easily a dozen channels, one even starring Dirt Digler, if you hunt for arrowheads or native artifacts there are channels there for you, and if you prospect or rockhound, well, there are dozens of channels there for you too...
This is my consolation for too many days trapped indoors...
A few observations. Most of the channels are appalling, poorly put together videos, people ranting at the camera, long boring footage of drives to locations, bad pictures of finds, some of the people are good at finding specific things (ie Gold), others have a good general knowledge and go off on various quests to search for different rocks...
Despite the monkey-cam shakiness and low production values there's a few channels that have provided me an abundance of useful information. Caver461 works out of the Bancroft area of Ontario and finds all sorts of different crystals and minerals, he's pitching his book, which you can only pray is more finished than his videos, but he finds cool stuff. If I end up in Bancroft I'm gonna buy it. There's Dan Hurd, who's got a variety of claims up in BC, mostly gold but he looks for other shit as well. There's Mining America, who's goal seems to be to explore and review every rockhounding spot across the US (a handy guide as the daughter and I will probably hit a few of them on our vacation), There's Liz Kreate, who finds stuff in Australia - Opals, Sapphires, Spinels, Gold, etc, you name it, Australia has it all, and there are guys who climb to the highest points on Mont Blanc to recover fantastic Quartz Crystal Specimens, they seem to have better videos than a lot of the competition.
You don't need to watch too many of these to get the idea, but some are clearly better than others. The better ones introduce the locality, what they're going for, what they hope to find, detail what strata or sediments to look in, show the finding of materials as well as what the materials look like when they're all cleaned up. The best ones will give you a bit of background geology to the area and explain why this area is good for such and such, but every video gives you something, a clue as to what to keep your eyes peeled for, and there's something infectious about the unbridled enthusiasm of the prospectors, it's addictive...
...and think, we live in one of the least populous, least explored places on earth, and the possibilities, well, they're still endless and the days are already wearing shorter and I'm trapped inside...