Trail To Gold

Fifty-three American women have participated in cross-country skiing in the Winter Olympics between the years of 1972 and 2018. In 2018, forty-six years after the first team competed, Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall won Olympic gold in the Team Sprint, in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the first Olympic medal for U.S. women's cross-country skiing. Five decades of women skiers stood up and cheered, celebrating this long sought after achievement. This book shares the collective journey of these women Olympians, with the skiers themselves telling the story. Part I combines individual stories along a variety of themes, to collectively demonstrate the challenges of competing against the best in the world. In Part II, virtually every one of the fifty-three wrote her own profile to describe her skiing career and post-Olympic life. Photographs throughout put faces with the stories and add vibrancy to the narrative. The anecdotes in Trail to Gold: The Journey of 53 Women Skiers, paint the picture of women's cross-country skiing over 50 years--a fascinating history recorded in personal heartbreak and triumph and in fun vignettes from life on the trail.

Examines the thrills and disappointments of the nineteenth-century rush for gold in California, during which people abandoned their jobs and homes and headed west in hopes of becoming rich.

In The Trail of Gold and Silver, historian Duane A. Smith details Colorado's mining saga - a story that stretches from the beginning of the gold and silver mining rush in the mid-nineteenth century into the twenty-first century. Gold and silver mining laid the foundation for Colorado's economy, and 1859 marked the beginning of a fever for these precious metals. Mining changed the state and its people forever, affecting settlement, territorial status, statehood, publicity, development, investment, economy, jobs both in and outside the industry, transportation, tourism, advances in mining and smelting technology, and urbanization. Moreover, the first generation of Colorado mining brought a fascinating collection of people and a new era to the region. Written in a lively manner by one of Colorado's preeminent historians, this book honors the 2009 sesquicentennial of Colorado's gold rush. Smith's narrative will appeal to anybody with an interest in the state's fascinating mining history over the past 150 years.

Tanner Layne and Raquel Merrick fell in love young, hard and fast and both of them knew a beautiful life they thought would be forever. Until Rocky left Layne, no explanation, no going back. Layne escapes The ‘Burg only to come back years later because his ex-wife has hooked herself to the town jerk and Layne needs to make sure his sons get raised right. Layne manages to avoid Rocky but when Layne gets three bullets drilled into him while investigating a dirty cop, he can’t do that because Rocky stops avoiding Layne. They make a deal to work together to expose the dirty cop but they have no idea the strength of their enduring attraction or the sheer evil at work in The ‘Burg. As Tanner Layne and Raquel Merrick play their game and dance around the pull that draws them together, Layne has to discover the dark secrets buried so deep in Rocky’s heart she doesn’t even know they’re there at the same time untangle a sinister web of crime so abhorrent it has to be stopped... at all costs. And to do it, Layne has to enlist everyone, including his ex-CIA mentor, Rocky’s detective brother, the town’s unpredictable informant and Layne’s two teenage sons all the while stopping Rocky from doing something crazy and keeping their game secret so Layne won't get himself dead.

Day Hiker: Gold Country Trail Guide II is the second in the Day Hiker series of trail guide books. Twenty-six more trails are described and photographed in the foothills of Northern California, up into the Sierra Nevada Mountains and down to the valley floor east of Sacramento.

The dramatic journeys of the 19th century Gold Rush come to life in this geologist’s tour of the American West and the events that shaped the land. In 1848, news of the discovery of gold in California triggered an enormous wave of emigration toward the Pacific. The dramatic terrain these settlers crossed is so familiar to us now that it is hard to imagine how frightening—even godforsaken—its sheer rock faces and barren deserts once seemed to them. Hard Road West brings their perspective vividly to life, weaving together the epic overland journey of the covered wagon trains and the compelling story of the landscape they encountered. Taking readers along the 2,000-mile California Trail, Keith Meldahl uses settler’s diaries and letters—as well as his own experiences on the trail—to reveal how the geology and geography of the West shaped our nation’s westward expansion. He guides us through a landscape of sawtooth mountains, following the meager streams that served as lifelines through an arid land, all the way to California itself, where colliding tectonic plates created breathtaking scenery and planted the gold that lured travelers west in the first place. “Alternates seamlessly between vivid accounts of the 19th-century journey and lucid explanations of the geological events that shaped the landscape traveled.”—Library Journal

Herman Hill, from whose memory these stories come, still lives in his beachfront home in Bahia de los Angeles. His stories, filled with humor and verve, illuminate the history of the beautiful Baja Pueblo of Bahia de los Angeles. A prospector, a dreamer, and an adventurer, Herman's stories capture both a region and a lost time in American history.

You’re in the middle of the Gold Rush, pioneer—and you are headed west on the Oregon Trail with hopes to strike it rich in this choose-your-own-trail experience. Travel in your large wagon train and decide whether you’ll stay the course to Oregon or take the California Trail toward Sacramento. Do your choices lead to a fortune-filled future, or will they lead you straight into danger? Westward ho!

Travel with Olympic gold medalist Jessie Diggins on her compelling journey from America’s heartland to international sports history, navigating challenges and triumphs with rugged grit and a splash of glitter Pyeongchang, February 21, 2018. In the nerve-racking final seconds of the women’s team sprint freestyle race, Jessie Diggins dug deep. Blowing past two of the best sprinters in the world, she stretched her ski boot across the finish line and lunged straight into Olympic immortality: the first ever cross-country skiing gold medal for the United States at the Winter Games. The 26-year-old Diggins, a four-time World Championship medalist, was literally a world away from the small town of Afton, Minnesota, where she first strapped on skis. Yet, for all her history-making achievements, she had never strayed far from the scrappy 12-year-old who had insisted on portaging her own canoe through the wilderness, yelling happily under the unwieldy weight on her shoulders: “Look! I’m doing it!” In Brave Enough, Jessie Diggins reveals the true story of her journey from the American Midwest into sports history. With candid charm and characteristic grit, she connects the dots from her free-spirited upbringing in the woods of Minnesota to racing in the bright spotlights of the Olympics. Going far beyond stories of races and ribbons, she describes the challenges and frustrations of becoming a serious athlete; learning how to push through and beyond physical and psychological limits; and the intense pressure of competing at the highest levels. She openly shares her harrowing struggle with bulimia, recounting both the adversity and how she healed from it in order to bring hope and understanding to others experiencing eating disorders. Between thrilling accounts of moments of triumph, Diggins shows the determination it takes to get there—the struggles and disappointments, the fun and the hard work, and the importance of listening to that small, fierce voice: I can do it. I am brave enough.