Flutterby™! : More weekend notes

As promised, albeit a little late, some more notes on our weekend. The weather looked like it wasn't going to lift after all, so rather than going back into Yosemite we decided to tool on up Highway 49, lookin' for adventure and whatever came our way. We saw a sign for a historical society in Coulterville, and, despite it being early on a Sunday, decided to stop.

So we dropped into the tourist info place, had a nice little chat on what was in the area, dropped into the little B&B/variety/antique store across the way (which was one of those wonderful places like you always hope you're going to find when you go to an estate sale, with lots of cool old tools and neat stuff) and chatted with the proprietor (and, yes, left with a few things...), and then went over to the historical society. We were prepared for your average town historical society, given that the narrow gauge steam engine out front was woefully incomplete and reconstructed with 2x4s if you looked closely, but instead we had a great time browsing some really cool exhibits, including someone's incredibly detailed reconstruction at 1" = 1' of some of the old buildings in town. Highly recommended.

I've tried to rework this a bit to capture the green of the mariposite in the roadcut just down the hill from Coulterville, but the overcast and the auto white balance were working against me. Picture quartz, but kelly green.

Having explored as much of that as we were going to see, we started back up the road towards Sonora. Stopped in at Railtown 1897, decided that it deserved a trek back later on in the season, and headed over to Columbia.

Columbia is an old mining town that's now a combination museum and mall, with assorted stores and shops in some of the old buildings, displays in others, even a house or two with a real live resident, and various docents in costume (although only a few of those this time of year). Had fun bouncing through the town, talking about Charlene's childhood memories of the place ("I was told this was a ghost town, so when I thought of ghost town, I thought of people all over the place").

It's also an old mining town, and in the center of it all it's obvious that someone thought that using hydraulic mining techniques on their building lot would result in something, giving some really interesting rock formations in the area.