O.K..  Most of the fall and winter I've been longing for, talking about, dreaming of and planning for good weather so that I can get out and look for some yellow metal. Well the time has come.  It's early in the morning, and about noon or a little afterwards, we'll be leaving to go out prospecting.  Now we'll see if we can put all of our dreams into a fruitful and rewarding motion and come out on top.  I know that to a lot of people this may sound greedy, materialistic and foolish, but like the song says, "You gotta have a dream. If you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?".  The poet Robert Service said, "Gold, and it's haunting and haunting...driving you onward and out. It's not the gold that I'm wanting, but merely the finding the gold". In other words, the reward is as much in the hunt as in the finding of the gold.  Not that I don't want the gold or the money that the gold can be converted into.  I would be lying if I said anything like that.  I have my own dreams of what I would do if I hit that big strike and solved a lot of if not all of my financial problems. What I am saying is that you have to prioritize things and the fun and excitement of the process is every bit as valuable as anything of a monetary nature that may come from the planning and carrying out of the plans.  Another thing that is hard to describe to anyone who's not been there, is the thrill of being the very first person on earth to lay eyes on a treasure of a gold nugget.  When you uncover a nugget for the first time, and pick it up and examine it, there is a real "rush" knowing that no one has ever laid eyes on that chunk of gold in all of the history of mankind.  In spite of the high price of gold ( it has actually broken the $1,000 per ounce mark now, I've been told) I know many prospectors who keep all of the gold that they find and refuse to part with it just because they want to be the only person in history to ever own that particular piece of gold. It's hard to explain. At any rate, I hope to be reporting our success to you in a few days and the fun we hope to have had by then in our efforts.  In the meantime, keep both feet planted in reality while dreaming your dreams and you can be a winner in both worlds.  Both are important.

Sooner,

Badger Bill