Alaska Gold Rush Diary

After these past few days of running around, Zhou Xin had actually begun to feel a little anxious.

He hadn't expected that the jungle here wasn't full of gold as he had imagined; so far, he hadn't even found a single grain of gold.

He was confident that with his abilities, he could not possibly miss anything; as long as he got close to a place containing gold, he would definitely be able to smell it.

After walking for so long without finding anything, he couldn't help but wonder if there was any gold at all.

However, Gaia is indeed a place rich in gold, and there are many large gold mines here.

This time, he deliberately avoided areas with concentrated gold mines and chose a more remote location to avoid conflicts with others.

Was this choice wrong from the very beginning?

Zhou Xin shook his head, suppressing these chaotic thoughts.

Now that we're here, we can only do our best.

Moreover, he had a vague feeling that there must be a body of water with huge gold reserves here, but he just hadn't discovered it yet.

He stayed up until 1 a.m., and was about to wake Alo to take over, but found that Alo had already crawled out of the tent.

This Alo is like someone with an alarm clock installed inside their body.

He was very tired. After giving Alo a few brief instructions, he crawled into the tent and fell into a deep sleep.

Perhaps because of the firelight, the night was very peaceful, and nothing strange happened.

Therefore, Zhou Xin slept very soundly that night, and when he woke up in the morning, he felt that his body had returned to its peak condition.

After baking overnight, the remaining fish had completely turned into dried fish.

Zhou Xin took out a few strips and threw them directly into the embers of the fire to roast them. After roasting them, he sprinkled them with salt and also roasted some palm hearts. This was their breakfast.

After eating and drinking their fill, the two packed their things and continued their journey.

Perhaps after resting last night, they had both recovered, or perhaps luck was finally on their side.

The rest of the journey was much easier for both of them, and they did not encounter any more cliffs that were difficult to climb.

Under these circumstances, their speed of travel increased significantly, and around noon, the two heard an even louder sound of flowing water ahead.

They practically ran forward and immediately saw a river lying across their path.

This river is much larger than the one where they are currently camping, with the widest part of the river being about five meters wide.

Because it is currently the dry season, there is still a dry riverbed several meters wide along the riverbank.

One can imagine that this river would be very wide during the rainy season.

Zhou Xin took out his phone map and saw that the river was the same one he had seen on the map before. It turned out that they had unknowingly walked more than ten kilometers.

In the jungle, a distance of ten kilometers is not a short distance.

As soon as they reached the riverbank, Zhou Xin's nose twitched, and a surge of joy immediately welled up inside him.

After nearly three days of arduous travel, and on the verge of collapse, he finally smelled that familiar sweet scent again.

The smell of gold!

The scent lingered on the dried-up riverbed; it was very faint, but it was real and definitely not his hallucination.

He didn't bother to rest; he threw his backpack on the ground and took out a shovel and a gold pan.

He scooped up a shovelful of soil from a spot on the riverbed that smelled of gold, put it into his pan, and began to squat down by the river to wash it.

Now he's very skilled at panning for gold, and he finished in just a few minutes.

He stood up, looked at the few golden grains left on the plate, and couldn't help but want to roar to the sky.

While Zhou Xin was panning for gold, A Luo stood by and watched, so he was the first to see the gold in the pan.

"There really is gold!" Even the usually taciturn Alo couldn't help but exclaim.

"That's right, it's gold! We've finally found traces of gold!" Zhou Xin said happily.

A relieved smile appeared on Alo's usually expressionless face.

"Mr. Zhou, you are amazing!" he exclaimed sincerely.

Zhou Xin walked around the riverbed for a while and said, "We haven't succeeded yet. There's very little gold here, so it's not worth mining."

Alo was slightly taken aback and looked at him questioningly.

Zhou Xin looked at the river and thought for a while before saying, "We need to work hard for a while longer until we find a gold-rich area in this river."

The fact that gold sands have been found on the riverbed here means that there must be gold deposits in this river.

What we need to do now is to find these gold deposits, and then we can officially start panning for gold.

Finding gold deposits was not difficult for Zhou Xin; it was just a matter of time.

Moreover, they can now walk along the open, flat riverbed, making the journey much easier and faster.

Based on the size of this section of the river, Zhou Xin was able to roughly determine that the gold must have been deposited upstream.

Without further delay, they ate a compressed biscuit and headed upstream along the river.

This journey was much easier than the previous jungle trek. They walked for more than an hour without feeling tired at all.

When Zhou Xin reached a bend in the river, he stopped.

He could smell a strong scent of gold.

Without needing to confirm twice, he had already made a judgment: this was a gold deposit.

In the inner bend of the river, thick layers of silt and sand are deposited, and the smell comes from those silt and sand.

Zhou Xin walked closer, grabbed a handful of sand, and brought it to his nose.

The aroma of gold filled the air, making Zhou Xin feel somewhat intoxicated.

A Luo looked at Zhou Xin, who had a strange appearance. Although he was very puzzled, he did not ask any questions.

He was actually very curious about how Zhou Xin was able to find the gold hidden in the mud and sand so quickly, but he wouldn't ask unless Zhou Xin told him.

In his view, all he had to do was follow Zhou Xin and help him find the gold.

What he cared about was helping Zhou Xin, not the gold mining itself.

"We can go back to camp and drag the stuff over," Zhou Xin said, his face beaming with undisguised joy.

Although this wasn't his first time panning for gold, the process of finding a gold mine this time was extremely difficult.

That's why finding the gold ultimately brought him even greater satisfaction.

He checked the map to see the relative positions of the camp and their current location, searching for the fastest route back.

He quickly determined a route: follow the river to the point closest to the camp in a straight line, then leave the river and cross the jungle to return to the camp.

In this way, although the overall journey is longer, the overall speed will definitely be much faster because you can travel along the river for several kilometers.

Traveling one kilometer through the jungle is more difficult than walking ten kilometers along a river.

For them, the river is like a highway through the jungle.