Did you miss Part One? You can find it here.
So I don’t know if you know anything about gold mining, aside from what you may have seen on Gold Rush, but it’s kind of a big deal. There are all kinds of people who join organizations like the GPAA and LDMA (a subgroup of the GPAA) and they go out and mine gold in their free time. It’s kind of mind blowing. At any rate, we’re members of the GPAA and as such we’re able to go to LDMA campgrounds whenever they have an outing, which is what we’ve done. We visited two camps: Blue Bucket in north east Oregon and Scott River in northern California.
Blue Bucket was great for the gold mining but not so great for the Little Love and I. We were pretty bored as there weren’t any lakes or rivers or anything for us to do except play around the campground:
*Playing at camp basically means climbing on mama*
Travelling between the two camps we got to stay at Diamond Lake:
I can’t even begin to tell you how hard it was to leave this lake. The mornings/evenings were freezing cold, literally, but the days were beautiful. Unfortunately, we had to keep moving; gold camp was calling!
Scott River is absolutely gorgeous. There are camp sites that look like fairy gardens:
There’s a river:
I honestly can’t say enough about the scenery and I hope these limited photos are enough to encourage you to go, too. Whether at Blue Bucket or Scott River, it was the people at the LDMA camps who really made the outings spectacular. It’s not just the people who run the camps, although they’re amazing, it’s the people who attend the outings. There were kids for our little man to play with, but even if there hadn’t been all of the adults were so attentive and kind. Many of them had grandkids they were missing on the trip and they showered our Little Love with all the adoration he could handle.
If you’re into the outdoors, good people, and a very low cost vacation, I encourage you to look into the GPAA/LDMA and discover everything they have to offer.
If you liked this post, you may also enjoy Part Three.