So we finally got across that treacherous trail and came to this broad open area right next to where the water was flowing. We decided this was a good spot, let’s try some test pans. So we pulled out some pans, put our equipment down to get a good breather, and we broke open the water bottle that we brought because we were huffing and puffing by then!
We use the little military shovel which folds up that I had backpacked in, and we grab some dirt. We put it in the pan and I started paying it out while my dad just sat recuperating. I got a couple of flakes but it was just topsoil so we couldn’t really go by that. So we dug down a little bit more right next to the water and we put the sluice box in the water and as we were digging down we were putting that material in this sluice box. Slowly, slowly we dug up about a 5 gallon bucket worth of material, and we were slowly working it through the sluice box. When it was time to clean it up I brought it out of the water, dumped all that heavier material from the sluice box into the pan, and began panning once more. Now this is the real test pan to see if we were in the right spot. It probably took us 30 minutes to one hour to get from the car to this point. So it was kind of nice, it didn’t take us too long to get there and get set up. (Sometimes it takes us a little longer because we like to procrastinate, have a couple of cold beers, start the day off right!) So I cleaned up the pan and there were small flakes, more so than last time before we started digging. So we knew we were in a fairly good spot. And we could see where other people had been digging – there were holes about 4 feet deep — they were trying to get down to bedrock, but they didn’t get all the way down. So I tried one of those holes. I got in one and started digging down even more. There was about 2 foot of material left in that whole before the bedrock. I got down to the exposed bedrock and I began working all that material. I was working with my little crevice tool pulling all the sand and material out of the crevices, working the entire bottom of the hole along the bedrock I had exposed.
And we started running that through the sluice box and lo and behold there were small little pickers probably about the size of a small bead, fairly small stuff but plenty of it so we decided to go full processing on this area where someone had already dug but they didn’t get all the way down. Why bother to go into another area when somebody had already done all this work for us – work smarter not harder! We decided that they had already dug down quite a bit for us so let’s go ahead and use that hole. I dug down; of course I do the digging while my dad runs the sluice box (he likes watching me do the heavy lifting – and the sweating!) Wisdom comes with age! So we set up lawn chairs, small little foldout chairs that we could fit in the backpacks, sat down on the chairs, and he was working the sluice box with all that material that I was digging out and putting into a bucket for him. So we just did that for a while working it and working it. We were doing bucket after bucket all day long. We decided to clean it up after the first bucket of material, and we were getting a little more gold with every pan that we were doing. Pretty much the rest of the day went like that.
We packed a lunch of tuna sandwiches and a big old can of Pringles; stuff that was easy to fit in the backpack. We had cookies and everything, you got have your sugar right! I lied to myself and told me that I really needed those 20 cookies! I mean, if I was ever abandon out there and I had a whole pack of Oreos it would save my life!
So I was down in a 6 foot hole that was really pretty wide – maybe 8 feet wide and of course the sides were sloped back. I didn’t really want to be in a coyote hole caving in on me so I made sure that it was wide enough that it was stable. As I got to the bottom it was a little slushy, but the bedrock at the bottom was probably 5 feet higher than where the water was in this stream, so there really wasn’t a water seepage problem into the hole. This side of the bank was high enough that I could dig down and not have that input of the water into the bottom of the hole seeping into it. It was a really good spot. And the funny part was that other people had been working the claim and they had dug out quite a bit of it, but if they had gone down two more feet they would’ve gotten all that stuff that we had found that day. They probably ran out of time or something.
It started getting dark because we were in a valley and so we were losing about two hours of sunlight or so, and we were thinking pretty seriously about getting out of there. This whole hike was a reverse hike which means that when we came in we went down, and so we needed to carry everything back uphill on the way out. So we finally decided to pack everything up and make our way out. So we did our little finishing cleanup at the end in the back of the truck once we got out. The material was all trapped and it wasn’t going anywhere and there was no way that we could lose it. Even if we spilled some in the truck it was somewhere that we could pick it up. So we went through the concentrations at the very end and found a nice little amount of remaining gold in that.
So overall it was a nice day, very relaxing. (I was doing all the work but it was still very relaxing!) Falling asleep was really easy at the end of the day! I would say that we got about a 10th of an ounce of gold out of that day. So we probably got about $120 out of that day – and enjoyed every bit of it!
It was one of those wonderful magical days that couldn’t be repeated. It was a very profitable day, I wish I could have more of those. Unfortunately the gold hides quite a bit. We decided to go out there couple weeks after that but it had rained heavily and all those holes were completely gone. We couldn’t find that spot ever again. That’s the elusiveness of gold! It was a really fun day. Needless to say, the sluice box worked great and I’ve had it ever since!