Little Treasures

I love finding old treasures whether it be a genuine find or an artifact found in an antique store. The pic above is of a spearhead that I found as a teen. The cell phone is for scale. I was walking down a gravel road in Clear Lake Ca. and saw a glimpse of green in the roadbed that didn't belong there. I dug it up and it was a spearhead made from a greenish and yellow rock I'd never before seen in that region.  The roadbed gravel was mostly river rock which had been dredged up nearby. So one must assume that a primitive man had once traded for this non indigenous stone spearhead and then used it to hunt game, losing it in a riverbed. Me finding it was beyond all odds as it was much more likely that it would be run over and crushed into a hundred pieces. I lived at Clear Lake and never saw a stone of those colors. Spearheads and arrowheads in the region are normally made of black obsidian which is plentiful and common in this volcanic region.

In my 20's I was climbing down the hillside between the Cliff House and the ruins of the Sutro Baths (A health spa from the 1800's) in San Francisco when I caught a glimpse of an old bottle neck jutting out of the hillside. I dug it up and the bottle read embossed into the glass: Florida Water, Murray and Lanman, No. 69 Water St New York.  Some Victorian health nut had drunk then tossed the bottle with abandon only for me to find it 100+ years later. Lucky me! What a connection with history!

In the foreground are what were the Sutro Baths, in the background is the Cliff House.  The hillside of which I spoke is between the two. None of the stuctures in this pic exist any longer.

The Cliff House as it once majestically stood, the Sutro Baths are on the far side out of sight from this angle. The rocks just offshore are usually covered with seals and seabirds.

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