Baker City, OR

We visited Baker city church of the Nazarene this morning with our friends. They just finished VBS, so we got to watch all the kids perform many fun songs. 

The pastor spoke on Hebrews 12, throwing off everything that hinders. 

After church, we went to lunch with another couple at the Sumpter Junction.

I had a delicious omelet and when everyone's tummy was full, we came home and got the trailer situated for our stay.

Ky helped dig purple potatoes for tonight's meal. 

Our afternoon outing was to Sumpter, a town about 45 minutes away.

 There is an old dredge there that was used in the early to mid 1900s for mining gold.

It is huge.

Despite the fact that our friend Mr. thistle did some gold-mining with the drainage, I didn't actually understand how it worked until today. 

This dredge that we saw today floats 9 feet deep in a pond.

As it digs up the rock in front of it, the water in the pond moves forward into the new hole and the dredge processes the buckets of dirt and rocks it picks up and spits out huge piles of rocks behind it filling in the backside of the pond.

So basically there's a huge machine in a moving pond that somehow finds small bits of gold. This particular dredge actually pulled $4.5 million worth of gold out of the ground. At the lower right you can see what the ground looks like after being dredged.

Some didn't like that good pasture land was turned into piles of rocks. 

The granddaughter of the last "dredge master" was working at the visitor center and shared some fun facts and stories. It was fun to hear it from someone who had heard the stories straight from the men living them. 

After our adventure we came home to a yummy dinner of elk burgers (which our hosts hunted themselves) and

homemade potato salad - using what we dug in the garden earlier. For dessert there was fresh boysenberry-blueberry pie! Yum!

And while we were eating, a doe and her two fawns walked by through the the pasture. 

Our kids ended the night sleeping out under the stars. 

Pointing out constellations.