Payette Children’s Forest Event

On Saturday, July 12, 2014, Perry Ponshock, Belinda Provancher and Bryan Hardel were involved with a children’s outreach program at the Little Ski Hill just west of McCall.  The event was hosted by the Payette Children’s Forest.  This event brings all sorts of businesses and outreach agencies together to put on an educational event for children.  This is the second year Midas Gold has participated. To help teach the children about geology and mining, we brought a huge display of different rocks, minerals and fossils. We wanted children to see all the different types of rocks and minerals they use every single day. We also were excited to help the children pan for gold. With a little help, the children quickly became experts at this mining technique and they had a lot of fun doing it. We even let them keep whatever treasures they found, including garnets, pyrite, quartz, sapphire and even a few real gold flakes. And what is a geology lesson without a volcano eruption? We had the children help us build a volcano out of mud so we could teach them how eruptions occur. In our case, we used a two liter bottle of diet coke and Mentos to mimic an erupting volcano. At times, our volcano erupted up to 20’ in the air!  The kids loved it! During the event, not only did we get to introduce children to new rocks and minerals and show them a fun volcano experiment, we also got to introduce some of the parents to eye opening facts about the materials used in daily life that are only supplied by successful mining.  Overall, it was a great success and we can’t wait to do it again next year.