Snowshoe Thompson's lost gold mine Traditional Geocache
Snowshoe Thompson's lost gold mine
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(regular)
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Quick find in a beautiful valley.
For more history on this amazing man, visit, http://www.tahoecountry.com/oldtimetahoe/snowshoe.html
Snowshoe Thompson was an amazing frontier hero. Born Jon Torsteinson-Rue in Norway, he came to America at age ten. He came west at age 24 in 1851 herding milk cows from Illinois.
Then he answered an ad in the Sacramento Union that advertised for " People lost to the world; Uncle Sam needs a mail carrier". He carried the mail from Placerville CA, to Genoa NV, twice a month for almost fourteen years. He did this even in winter over the sierra nevada mountains using what people then called snowshoes, which were actually very long wooden skiis.
He was never paid for this unbelievable feat.
However.....he did occasionally bring back very rich ore samples that he would show visiters at his home in Diamond Valley. Dying suddenly in 1876 he never shared the location of his find with his wife and young son.
But he would say that he could sit on his porch and see the exact location of his mine.
Now, there are two old mines on the other side of those big mountains. The burnside and the alhambra mines. So there IS gold in those hills.
So take a minute after finding the cache...gaze upon those magestic mountains to the west...somewhere up there...could be a fortune in gold.
FTF PRIZE! There is a small vial of REAL GOLD hidden in one of the objects in the cache. I panned this gold myself on the consumnes river. It is fairly well hidden, but IT IS THERE! GOOD LUCK!
Additional Hints
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