On about the fifth time across one of these slopes, and down near the little wash...bam! I found a nice chunk of rock, laced through with gold. Wow! How had I missed this?

…while we were packing up, my wife called for me to help her with something, so I set the pan containing the gold down, off to the side of the parking area.

Sure enough, after hiking a couple miles uphill and hacking through some brush, we found the place just as he had described it.

All of this made me have to conclude that those dummies just didn’t know what they were doing. It was a couple of years later before the solution for this puzzle became clear to me.

…I was looking down on what was a frightening 500-foot sheer drop-off. We were precariously close to the edge as the shoulder was practically non-existent.

It said to put a number of different-sized nuggets in a jar, and then cover them with the magic cleaner fluid. Then, vigorously shake the contents for a couple of minutes.

My next strategy was to walk anywhere and everywhere that I had been inside this home and garage. I looked on the floor, in the bathroom, I checked the bathroom trash can, and I even pulled the shower curtain back and looked in the bathtub.