Long story short, Missed.

So the first day there, we almost died to dangers I forgot to mention: Hypothermia and bumblefucking.

so after a good ten hours on the road, heading north from where we lived, we arrived at a gold claim just north of Chicken Alaska, which is a gold mining camp in it's own right. it was nine forty, an dthe sun was starting to go down (Since it's summer)

The old sourdough who was showing us where our claim was (she bought it from him) was like, "Are you sure you wanna set up camp here?"

We ignored him, because he didn't feel the need to contradict us, and we didn't feel the need to press for answers as to why that might be a bad idea. We found out.

The first thing that we noticed was that by the time we were able to even start setting up the camp, it was already pitch black outside, close to eleven o'clock. we could handle that: we brought five lanterns, providing us alllll the light we needed to set up tents.

So at my sisters behest, we started leveling out the campsite for our smallest tent, because that's the only one that would fit there.

"you see?" She proclaimed, "This is why we brought three different sized tents."

Well, turns out, I'd accidentally left the tent's poles with another tent, so we actually only had the two bigger ones left, and they definitely wouldn't fit at that camp site.

Which meant we had no tents, essentially.

Then it started raining.

A sane person might have gone back to the car and tackled the problem in the morning, safe and dry, but we were like,
"You see? this is why we brought seven tarps!"

So we strung some rope between a few trees and made a passable rain shelter and then started putting together our cots, around 2 am, after driving over three hundred miles and clearing land for hours. I was, personally, almost unable to think at that point.

So we climbed into our sleeping bags, in the open, with just a tarp to keep the rain off.

I slept great. Other people not so much. The day before had been very sunny and warm, so that residual heat was completely blown off by the rain by morning, and it was somewhere below 40 degrees, and damp, sucking away heat like an expensive whore.

My sister almost froze that night and we all spent the entire morning trying to stay dry and warm, maintain body heat rather than pan for gold. Toward the afternoon, the rain let up and we were able to do the tiniest amount of prospecting (We didn't find anything) but it had already been decided.

So we ran away from that place with our tails between our legs, hiking all our gear back through the woods and getting utterly soaked in the process, until we were all packed up around 5 pm.

We knew 5pm was way too late to start the trip back...but where could we go? We didn't have money, and we didn't wanna sleep in our cars. In the end, we bummed a bed off of the sourdough, sleeping in an empty cabin while my sister slept in the car with her dogs.

the wood-fired stove had a crack in it, and whenever air was pushed into the chimney, smoke would pour out into our room, filling the air with smoke.

my wife and I were seriously considering the possibility that we might be suffocated by a faulty stove, but it was windy and raining, and almost freezing outside, so we stayed. needless to say it took a while to fall asleep, staring at the death stove belching smoke into our room.

the next morning, we were unanimously ready to go home, but... my sister has two gold claims and you gotta do 'work' on both of them each year. or else they revert to the government. - I think that's to prevent an asshole from claiming all of alaska and just sitting on it.

The second place was paradise. An easy to navigate stream, bright sun, warm day. We could have stayed there the rest of the time we had on our prepared trip, but we were ready to go home, so we, on the sourdough's advice, did a 'geological survey' - I.E. we looked at it. - and did some test goldpans, found jack shit and went home, defeated.

The misery stops there, you might think. You would be wrong. because while we were gone, a couple wildfires really got going to the north and southwest of our house, but it wasn't super close so there was no need to panic.

And that's when, during our sunday evening D&D game, I got a call that I needed to get back home right freaking NOW on account of wildfire, and we got to spend the rest of the night desperately packing all our non-soggy clothes into a bag and get ready to make like a tree and get the fuck outta there.

no evacuation notice yet, but we're on high alert.

If I'm still here, with a house tomorrow, I'll see you guys then.