RIght in front of my eyes

This post is a follow up from the Virginia City post as well as the Lessons learned on the road post. I am at this moment updating the post's, downloading photographs from this weekend and reflecting back on where I was and doing this past weekend. I grew up in Whitehall Montana, a small mining town in western Montana. Not many people live there maybe at most around 1200, give or take. People usually don't stop in Whitehall but pass on by. Growing up there I never even realized the rich culture and traditions that are still there today. I had to actually find out by radio about a geological rarity called the Ringing Rocks, and so that is where I went. In search of these rocks that actually ring like church bells when hit with a hammer. The road wound up and up into the back country, not a bad road at all, just steep. Around a bend in the road I found the ringing rocks, a huge pile of rock that to me looked out of place, and I sat there and thought to myself " How could I of grown up not even 20 miles from here and never of known? How could I have been so blind?" As I walked around, this is when I hit upon the area's culture, a huge hole in the ground up the hill with an old ladder disintegrating going down into it. An old mine shaft that someone had dug out over 100 years ago. There was an old drill bit stuck into the ground, and no other remnants left to speak of but that one ladder going down into the darkness. I sat there and tried to place myself back then, and think of climbing down that ladder into the vast darkness trying to find something to claim a stake on. The ladder told me more than I could of thought, it told of a time of prospectors never ending search for something, the hard lives they lived and it told me of how they never gave up, but kept on digging and digging, never knowing how things would end, whether they would come out alive, or whether that was the area to be.
I can't believe how much culture can be in one area, how many different traditions there are. I now know that this journey will be and is one of the most rewarding things I have done not only for myself but for others. To be able to teach others about the small things in life, that rich mining culture that once sustained whole communities and lives, or that tradition of handing down a farm to the younger generation.