With successively lower temperatures as the water mixture cools, new sets of minerals are formed and many of those stable at a higher degree of heat became subject to alteration as the temperature progressively moved lower.

Nuggets make for the best memories and this patch was just adding to mine. In the hours of daylight I had left, I worked from that nugget to the bottom of the patch, collecting eight more nuggets.

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.

...these nuggets have not traveled far from the lode because the golden wire lattices would have been torn apart or flattened during weathering of rock and deposition by violent stream action.