My Best Day

My favorite time gold panning was when I took my dad and one of my coworkers out to Anza Borrego. There was a small seasonal creek there. It was spring time and it had just snowed. There was a small stream running and we were just hiking along the side of the seasonal creek. It was very peaceful. That’s one of the things I love about gold panning, how peaceful it is. It’s a great way to spend the day sitting down beside this running water; it is so relaxing when you’re working this sluice box. Hiking down into the place it’s very adventurous. It’s almost like the pioneers days. You’re going into this untouchable land and it gives you a primal sense of human discovery. You’re finding this new place and you’re there for a reason to find one specific thing – gold! You can carry the sluice box on your back, and when you carry it in, you find small trails here and there. In anza there was a small trail to get to the place. We followed the stream up into a small canyon. This was a canyon that my coworker had owned. We knew where the claim was, so we knew that we weren’t on somebody’s private property. We normally worked on public land, but the company that I worked for own the mineral rights to this land. So you could process the material there and find and keep any of the gold that you found. So we backpacked in; I carried the sluice box on my back. It has a strap attachment so you can sling it over your back and I had my dad caring the pump to the sluice box. We trekked up and my coworker hauled the rest of the other materials. It wasn’t a bad hike about a mile but it was still on the claim and we knew it was untouched. We used Google maps and we had a looked at this area, and we had a map of the claim, and we compared it to Google to find a good spot that was hard to get to so it would not have been overworked by other people prospecting. And in that location we found a good amount of small fine gold. We found a small little pocket and we knew we were in a good spot – a small pocket of that fine gold. A couple of sluice boxes full and a couple of pans. Most of the gold was up in the top of the stream sediment. At the end of the day we came out with a decent amount of gold. All that work put into it and it definitely came out to be a good day with a good prospect. We hauled our lunch in with a small propane grill and we had hot dogs! It was a great day. It took us about an hour and a half to drive to this location from Temecula, so it was local for us. It was a nice little daytrip and I slept like a baby when I was done!