Hi everyone, welcome back to Cody's Lab
So, Kanyon and I are about to be flying up to Alaska
Which means that before I get on an airplane, I should change into something that hasn't been around explosive material.
Because the dogs and the swabs, I might set off an alarm of some sort.
So, let's change into something that hasn't been exposed to chemicals (snaps)
There! That's a little better. Ok, now, my boots are gonna need to be fixed because they've had a lot of stuff dumped on them.
Yeah, these boots have definitely had it. I'm going to restore them to how they were when they were new (snaps).
There! that's a little better!
Ok, we'll lace up the boot and... look at that. The lace is already broken.
Now, the laces these come with are just really no good.
So, you know what? I'm gonna fix those right now (snaps).
There we go! Now these are much better laces.
They don't break nearly as much.
Actually, you know what? What am I doing? I could just teleport to Alaska!
Ok! Looks like I'm standing on a glacier. What luck! How about we channel my inner geologist.
Ok!
There we go... a glass of ice water.
Aw man, that is great.
Basically, I'm drinking snow water here, but it doesn't taste like the normal snow water you get
like in the city or something cuz this water fell as snow hundreds if not thousands of years ago.
Well before the industrial revolution so there's really no pollution in here.
Also, we're pretty far from anywhere that would be producing pollution.
So, unfortunately, glaciers are extremely windy and exceedingly bright
and so most of the footage I got at the glacier was completely unusable.
I'll do a much more in depth video on glaciers when I'm doing my geology series which I hope to start sometime in the fall.
Well, since we're in Alaska, I figure I might as well do a little gold panning.
I don't expect to find much but here we are in Hope, Alaska and underneath these tree roots, you can see
There's been exposed-
There's a hard pan of clay right there, right next to the river
So this hard pan of clay is going to catch the gold
Because the gold, as it sinks down through the gravel, its gonna stop right there.
So the gold is gonna be right here, so let's grab a few pans and see what we can catch.
Let's see if I can get a better shot of what I'm doing down here.
So here is clay... can you see it? And the gold wouldn't sink down through the clay.
Cuz the clay would be solid even when it was wet.
But right on top of the clay is where the gold is going to be.
So I'm gonna clean out underneath of these rocks right along this layer where the clay is.
(scraping) M'kay
And after I've loosened that up with the pick, I'm gonna take it and put it over here in my gold pan.
There we go.
So, that's all I'm doing here.
Alright, got me a big pan of stuff out from underneath those roots
Let's see what we get out of it.
Big balls of clay here.
Be sure to break 'em up... the clay is where the gold is going to be.
We're actually gonna dump this stuff into this finishing pan here
Okay...
I see some gold here.
Spin this around...
And there it is.
That's quite a bit for a single pan
Let's see if I can get a little more
You see that nugget in there?
I think that's probably one of the biggest gold nuggets I've ever found.
Oops
Oh, there it is - on my fingernail.
So here's the concentrates after an hours worth of work with these two pans
Let's see how much gold I collected.
And you see? That looks like quite a bit, actually.
Man, these flies are getting bad.
They bite!
But, here we go.
There's actually surprisingly very little black sand for the amount of gold that you're getting.
That's unusual. Usually you find way more more black sand than gold
I mean, most of this is black sand here but normally I'd like fill this whole pan with black sand
Black sand is of course the iron oxides which are naturally occurring in the soil
but because they're heavy, you also find it with gold.
Run up some of these rocks
There we go
Okay. How's that for an hours worth of panning?
And four hours of driving! [Chuckles]
Let's tap it up to the edge
There you go
There's probably less than a gram of gold there but it sure was fun getting it.
But, uh, now we gotta go. Unfortunately, I can't pan for much longer.
So I'm now back at the uninteresting white wall in Utah
In fact... I ought to fix that. (snaps)
There we go! That's a little bit better.
So, my trip to Alaska was exceedingly short.
Hopefully I'll be able to go up there for a little longer time some time in the future.
One thing that we did do is that we picked some fireweed. And we made fireweed jelly.
Making fireweed jelly is extremely easy to make, you just pick the flowers, make tea out of them
and then add lots of pectin and sugar before putting them in some jars
This is definitely my number three favorite thing to put on toast after honey and blackberry jam with seeds.
Anyway, hope you guys enjoyed and I'll see you next time.
(Outro music)