Desert Field Notes From Gold Claim

Over the next week or so we will try to post daily field notes from our trip. Of course i have to type all of this on my tiny phone so they will be brief...
Our first day back on the claim and boy do we feel sluggish. We have active lives back in the city but it's nothing compared to a week on the gold claim. Your body and mind are alive and alert at all times to protect you from desert. There isn't any 911 out here. In one day Matt managed to take a physically challenged ballerina tumble down the side of a hill and at dinner a bug decided to fly right smack into his eyeball and abraise the darn thing. Now his eye has gook seeping out... Ewww
The sonoran desert is bathed in millions of wildflowers blanketing the floor. Many of the cacti are beginning to bloom and that is a beautiful sight to see. I'll post some pictures tomorrow of the many different wildflowers. Most all of them are edible or useful for medicinal purposes. I was thinking of grilling our first prickly pear cacti on this trip... Yum yum:)
The ground is a little damp from the last storm that blew through and prevented us from coming down... So we hiked around today looking for a new section of the wash to work. We did manage to find a nice gold specimen. Little nugget looks like a fish. It was sitting just behind a huge boulder in the wash. We had to shovel a lot of overburden to find this little guy but it was worth it!
We ended our day with a warm dinner around my new and improved fire-pit... The dogs stretched out in the dirt and Matt and I telling stories around the fire with a claim neighbor. Good first day!