There is a curve in the New River streambed near Jefferson, N.C., where the rock looks like a slew of fingers running clear across the stream...I would love to pan the sand behind those ridges but physically I can no longer move well enough to get down there. I've got some "black sand" and gold from several N.C. streams and used to know a kid who was paying his way through college simply by panning up near Albemarle on his weekends.

In the sluices of 4 and 5...the next time you're out there pick a spot behind a rock and grab a good sized bag of the soil...when you get home run it carefully through a gold pan...if you find some you can send me a little!!

To a non-climber this looks easier than the Devil's Tower.

Some great shots. Jim 70, I've got my helmet signed by Richard Petty. Remember that for several years we attacked car fires from the sides in case the bumpers would fly off? I photographed one arson fire that the bumpers were almost twenty feet from the car...abandoned on Ft. Bragg. Last week we had a collision with fire on U.S. 1 near Vass, N.C. that the driver was pinned by his legs and gotten out of the car by a collection of bystanders who literally saved him from burning to death. The car was fully involved by the time our engine got there and the guys had knocked it out by the time I could weave my way around traffic to get there.

I'm thinking some kind of spider nest...I've seen similar.

You can miss it as easily as I missed the three mountain goats standing in the shade of a gnarled tree on a mountaintop in Zion that I didn't see until way after the fact.

So pdsilen...you don't believe that our lawmakers were correct when they said "public domain"???

The closest that I ever had as a potential problem was one day several years ago when I was photographing a wreck scene for the highway patrol and a prison guard came over and told me not to take any pictures because his prisoners who were picking up trash on the side of the road would be in the picture. I told him to tell them to turn their backs if they didn't want to be in the pictures and that was the end of that. Several times through the years I've had people tell me not to photograph an incident for whatever reason and I always tell them to take it up with the investigating officer. I've even been threatened a couple of times...the funniest being on a wreck scene where an older male told a couple of the EMS guys and girls that he was going to take my camera away and beat me with it. One of the Paramedics told him that every official on the scene was a friend of mine and it would be extremely hazardous to mess with me. When they told me about it later I thought it was hilarious. I've also had family members ask for photos and I always oblige. I even have one woman that claims that I saved her son's life on a wreck near where I live...I remember the wreck but damned if I know what I did that would have saved anyone.

Definitely color...what's the story in black and white? And I freely admit that I am very biased...most of the time on here if I open a black and white I close it before it loads. Life is in color!

fantastic country...and on the back side of Zion it is very similar. I took a picture of one of the outcroppings of rock with a wind blown withered tree on it and when I got home and put it on the computer I discovered I had gotten a couple of rams standing under the tree.

Is that the back side of Zion?

That's true but the reverse is that cellphones save multitudes of lives...I'm old enough to remember that if you were driving down the road and saw a wreck or fire that you had to go knock on doors to find someone home with a phone. Several years ago I was on I-95 and actually saw a car go into the median and overturn. I stopped and told my wife to call while I was checking the driver and she told me later that she was the third caller...this was literally a few seconds because she was calling as I was pulling into the median. We get calls into Central now literally while the incident is occurring. We also use them to map calls in areas that we might not be totally familiar with and we use the gps features to locate lost people. They are amazing devices.

The problem with peanut butter is that it will harden and lose some of it's scent. The gumdrops are killers. I never had a mouse problem in any setting, residential to commercial, that I didn't solve and I was in the business for over thirty years...that's where the "skyline-pest" comes from...the "fire" comes from my currently 31 years as a vollie.

They are oblivious to their surroundings and never notice the cars, thugs, snakes, etc., that are targeting them. Yesterday I was next to a young lady that was TEXTING while driving in traffic. I've seen people on cellphones while driving through our wreck scenes. Incredible!

That works, Jerry, and what I used to do was press the sugar coated soft gumdrops ( the soft gumdrops with the grains of sugar on them ) onto the trigger...they will go after them with a vengeance. Also place your traps so that when they trigger that they are springing towards a flat surface. I usually always put them against the baseboards because when mice get scared they run to the surface and use their whiskers to maintain contact because they can't see very well. You can also use boxes or objects to "guide" the mice onto the traps. If you find droppings in two different rooms it means you have two different families in there so you should trap accordingly. I almost always used glueboards and found them to be highly effective...I didn't like poison because of the possibility of pets or kids getting into it. Hope this helps.