This is my first gold panning trip I ever went on; it was back in 2013 or so. And it was very exciting because we found a lot of gold – but not like you’d expect! I was with a coworker when I was first introduced to gold prospecting. We went out to an area called the Pinacate Mining District, right off of 74 Highway not far from the Oldtown Paris area. My coworker James had a 7 ½° quadrangle map of this mining districts with the old mines being shown on the map. And the map showed that there were about a dozen mines throughout this one area that we were interested in, and there was a river – it look like a wash – that went through almost every single one of these old mines in this one area.
This was BLM land, and he got the 7 ½° map from the BLM. It was a place of old abandoned mines and very spooky – there was an eerie feeling to it. We went through this area a little trying to get a feel for it. We did go over to one of the minds – I don’t remember the name –which was closed down sometime in 1930s or 1940s. And we managed to go in and James showed me a little passage where if you look up on the roof and shined your flashlight you can see this shiny quartz vein going all the way down through the mine. We followed it through the mine until you couldn’t walk in any further. So we found one of the veins that they were mining in this area. One of the major veins in the area was called the Good Hope Quartz and that was what they were following – that started the major mining boom in that area in 1874 or 1875. Old town Paris was actually named Pinacate. It was the name of Paris before the city was renamed Paris. There were a whole bunch of placer mining operations that were going on in the Paris area, and one thing led to another and they started doing hard rock mining. If you’re finding placer deposits there has to be a mother lode!
Now my buddy James toured through this area a lot with his off road vehicle, so he was really familiar with it. And he was telling me about a waterfall that flowed during the rainy season in this area. And he said there may still be water out there at time of year, or at least some water puddled up, so there would be a little bit of water there for panning. And we might have a chance of digging down and finding something. So we decide to go out there and give it a try. It was a pretty hot day; it was probably about 95°F. We decided to go out there in my four-wheel-drive; it was kind of necessary because of the road. It’s sort of like an unkept fire road. And so we made our way down to this waterfall area – the tail end of the wash – and as we were descending into this slot canyon and it started cooling down. As we got into this narrow space the temperature really cooled off, so that was really nice. We got down to the area where I had a place to park my car and we found a little side pocket to park it in, and we got out and start hiking down to the waterfall. We had a Home Depot bucket, a shovel, and a gold pan – that’s all we had! Our goal was just to see if we could find anything.
Next Week: We Struck Gold!