My friend has a wood house deep in the forest of South Slovenia. Bears live there. He is wild at heart, just like many of my classmates from Faculty of civil and geodetic engineering, who were invited to visit him in his new house, which he painted in Swedish red! We are surveyors by education, so we tend to value spending time outside, on the fields and forests. Before I visited him I did a research about the area. I found interesting facts. The city below these hills has an unexploited belt of fine clay. There were brick factories before, but now there is no existing industry for clay. During research I came across an article about geology of that region. The article was from Duška Rokavec. I looked at the satellite maps for any land exposures and we also got some instructions from our ceramic friend.

We went together with Živa – now we are called clay digging buddies. The old brick factory was disappointing and scary. It is now a chicken farm. Živa said it’s like scene from Texas chainsaw massacre. There were no clay remnants. Only donkeys herding around the large buildings. We took a turn and decided to explore in the nearby forest. Forest path was cut between the hills so we found some exposed land. We started digging and found – clay!

We were slightly disappointed but we still managed to fill our bags each with around 30 kg of clay. There was this big promise of best Slovenia clay, but we only scratched some old forest road. We did not stop at the area which was directly locating clay in the article. We drove by the location and it was fields and forest – and we would probably need a lot of time to get trough vegetation. What we found instead was piles of dirt by the road, which someone dug somewhere and brought it to his field. We picked around and found – clay! Nice grey chunks of it already dry from crazy summer sun. We filled some bags of that clay as well and with that finished our clay search in the region, but only for that day. We need to go back and dig deeper!