Sting has ‘no truck’ with his rock peers who oppose vaccines
After spending much of the last decade tending to his Broadway musical, “The Last Ship,” Sting will set out on a maiden voyage this fall when he opens his first residency in Las Vegas at Caesars Palace on Oct. 29. The show, called “My Songs” and scheduled to run through Nov. 13 before returning in June 2022, will precede the Nov. 19 release of “The Bridge,” a new set of poprock songs he says were “written in a year of global pandemic, personal loss, separation, disruption, lockdown and extraordinary social and political turmoil.”
The singer, 69, called from his home in Italy, where he said he’s “waiting to start work – waiting to get back to my life.”
Q: Have you been in Italy for most of the pandemic?
A: Wherever there was a studio, that’s where I was – New York, the Bahamas, everywhere. That’s how I kept myself sane, turning up at 10:30 every morning and working until dinnertime.
Q: Would you have made a record if COVID-19 hadn’t happened?
A: It was certainly time for me to make a record, but the circumstances were unique. It’s difficult to get people
1996 and bought out those claims in 2003.
Located 23 miles south of Libby, the land surrounding the Libby Creek area has been of interest to prospectors since the early 1860s, when it was home to up to 600 miners working at a camp known as Libbysville.
By 1876, only one miner was reported to be working the creek, but a second gold rush in 1885 brought another wave of miners to a new camp known as Lake City or Oldtown. A store in the mining camp was supplied by a packstring that brought supplies via a trail from Thompson Falls. Mining on the Creek hit its peak from 1889 to 1909.
Hydraulic mining operations began around 1909 and continued until the late 1940s, when mining activities in the area began to trail off.
The current gold panning area was acquired through a land exchange in 1987 and opened to the public the following year.
With their claim just a short walk from Libby Creek, the Northwest Montana Gold Prospectors are continuing a 160-year tradition of prospecting in the area.
The Northwest Montana Gold Prospectors started as a local group of mining and prospecting enthusiasts, but over the years it has seen hundreds of members from across the country. These days, it has about 60 active members.
“Some people stay members forever, and then there are some that we see for a few years and then we never see them again,” group secretary Don Roe Jr. said. “There are also the one-and-dones. They come up here on summer vacation and join the club. Many of them pay their club dues every year, but they never come back. I think part of it is just being able to tell people they have a gold claim in Montana.”
The group began working its claim with shovels and buckets and slowly progressed to the current operation, which includes the monthly rental of an excavator and up to nine trommel screens that help sift the material.
Currently, the group spends one weekend a month in the summer and two weekends in September getting together to search their claim for gold, splitting their haul equally at the end of each outing.
Randall’s association with the group
began in 1998 when she got interested in metal detecting and began looking for a place to pursue her new hobby. After speaking with Jill Taber at her shoe store in Columbia Falls, Randall decided to join the Northwest Montana Gold Prospectors for one of their Libby Creek outings, where she found a small nugget about the size of her pinky fingernail.
“After that, you couldn’t get me away from here. I have been hooked ever since I found that first piece of gold,” she said. “Some people say I am lucky, but it is more of a combination of patience and tenacity.”
While the majority of finds are not nearly that large, Randall says there are still some “pretty darn nice pieces of gold” to be found at Libby Creek.
Between food, gasoline and the cost of renting the excavator, each monthly outing costs the organization around $1,300, which the group offsets with the spoils of its labor.
“We are all out here to find gold, but it is more about the friendships that come out of these get-togethers,” Randall said. “The gold is nice, but friendships made out here are the real treasures.”