As I laid in my Jeep and tried to get some rest, I began to realize how tired I was. I felt like a little kid who walked around Disneyland for 12 hours with his parents.

On the day prior to Mother’s Day I was able to get out and spend a few hours prospecting. I wanted to try some new settings on my detector, and I had a place in mind to do that.

I could see lots of quartz, both loose on the hillsides and in the numerous small prospect diggings. There was a small gold rush here more than a century ago.

Gold, on the other hand, is super rare, and is one of the rarest elements in the earth’s crust. It averages only 0.000004 percent of the earth’s surface. That is four parts in a billion.

When hunting for nuggets does not yield any gold for a couple days, it can get pretty frustrating. But it turns into serious mental anguish when it stretches into weeks or months.

At this point, stress raised my blood pressure and I was figuring out escape routes through the brush, but thought it best to continue the conversation.