(Did you ever wonder who these great grey 'They' are, that seem to know the latest word in just about everything. No one seems to have a clue to who they are but whoever they are they sure seem to know a lot of stuff).

At any rate say what you want, instant wealth is definitely in Man's psyche.

A prospector came into my downtown Vancouver office one day in the mid sixties, asking me if I was interested in checking out a cave he had found at the end of Stave Lake up the Fraser Valley just East of Vancouver. He was convinced it was the sic, 'Lost Indian's gold mine'.

   Nearly every area in the world has a fabled lost treasure, lost mine, lost city, lost tomb, or lost something worth a pile of dough. If you find it, you're rich. That is if you manage to survive all the Indiana Jones type traps somebody supposedly laid out. Million Dollar Lotto's weren't there first. Indiana Jones just capitalized on it.

   Vancouver is no different. During the Fraser River gold rush of the last century, an Indian used to canoe into New Westminster every spring, just up the Fraser River form Vancouver. The Indians used to call gold lust 'White Man's Fever' with good reason. Now with Indian land Casinos everywhere, it’s everyone’s fever.

This particular Native American must have had it pretty bad because he would canoe into port every spring loaded to the gunnels with the stuff.

   After partying around town for the summer, in his native tongue he would say “Hasta la vista baby, farewell, au revoir, ciao, sayonara, adios, auf wiedersehen, goodbye, so long, see ya later, and chow”. Then head back up the Fraser River. As hard as anyone tried to follow him, after about two or three turns up the river he would give them a couple of hip swivels and that would be the last anybody would see of him until next spring. So nobody had a clue to where his gold was coming from and he wasn't telling. Hence was born the legend of the fabled lost Indian's gold mine.

The Federallies, who were a lot more interested in who they could string up for any reason at the time than who was innocent or guilty, didn't buy into the lost gold mine theory and concluded without proof that he must have been pouncing on prospectors coming down the Fraser River every spring with gold off the brow from working sluice boxes all winter. So they summarily convicted him of piracy on the high canoe and unceremoniously strung him up.

     The prospector who had come into my office, wasn't buying the Federallie's story. And was convinced he had found the sic, Lost Indian’s gold mine in an isolated cave sitting part way up a canyon wall north of Pitt Lake. The canyon wall was located part way up the Pitt River which fed Pitt Lake from the north. Which was part way up the Fraser River Valley from Vancouver.

   Nearly all of British Columbia had been completely mapped by the mid sixty's. But this particular part of the Coast range, starting just east of Vancouver and extending due north for hundreds of miles along the Fraser River as its base line, was so wild and woolly'd that few had ever come out alive let alone bothering to map it out.

   Six foot beavers were reputed to live in there. Ever notice how the fabled creatures of the planet all live in areas where no one can prove them out. For example, Lock Ness in Scotland is too deep to go down there and check. The same for ‘Okopogo’ in Okanogan Lake in British Columbia. It’s like monsters under the bed for kids, only grown up into adult hoodoos for the parents.

   In fact blaming the unprovable for the unthinkable has been a ploy of man since the beginning of recorded history. Whenever a lady in ancient Greece became laden with child and the husband wasn’t around at the time, she would conveniently proclaim the father to be Zeus in the form of a swan and would not repent.

    Actually the area where the six foot beavers were supposed to live really did have a reputation for swallowing up hikers and explorers by the 'Outer Limits' load. Who would go off into the area never to be seen again. Sasquatches were also said to live there in large tribes, and we just went through covering how that works.

   So because this area was not known in detail, plus had some considerable mystique about it, and because where better for the Indian's lost mine to be hiding out, and because the Indian had to be getting his gold from at least one way or place or another  the last time I checked, the fellow in my office was convinced he had found the somewhere and was now looking for the one way or another to get back up there to give it a good look.

Never being one to distain a possibility of getting rich quick in the mouth, I rented a helicopter and off into the wilds the prospector and I went to take a look.

The helicopter dropped us at the left top end of Stave lake where a small narrow River came out of the mountains, and we took off along a narrow path going up along the canyon top from there. It was through some of roughest, meanest, fiercest, toughest looking forest anyone ever walked though, I mean ever, even with the sort of path we were following, We were hiking though some very decidedly very wild and very unfriendly country.

  The going up alongside the river was therefore excruciatingly slow. And we were going up the easy part high above the shore line of the river coursing far below along the path. Without the path it would have taken weeks to go the same distance the terrain was so wild and overgrown. It was no wonder the area had never been properly surveyed yet, and we were only in the first token few miles or so of the hundreds of miles running due north of where we stood.

   To make a long story short, we finally reached a point where the river canyon opened right up into an expanse a couple of hundred feet wide. We were now about three hundred feet or so straight up the canyon wall above the river cascading below in fierce foaming white torrents. The prospector pointed to a round coloured grey smudge on the canyon wall on the other side of the river, saying, "See, there, the lost Indian's gold mine'.

As hard as I looked, all I could see was a round grey coloured smudge. I concluded therefore that the prospector probably needed a pair of glasses and that was the end of that.

The point of this introduction is that some forty six years later I decided to take a look at the area in Google Earth to see what a keen eye in the sky might turn up. It didn't turn up the lost Indian's gold mine, but It sure as heck turned up a surprise that is maybe even more intriguing.

What it turned up looks for all the world like the image of a micro chip circuit board sitting right in the middle of a tiny mountain top lake just north east of Vancouver British Columbia.