We Struck Gold! (Part 2 of 2)
We may have trekked about an eighth of a mile down into the wash which was at the bottom of the waterfall, so it wasn’t too far of a walk. Finally we came up on this place where there was a cliff; I would say that the waterfall drop was about 75 feet high and we were near the plunge pool. It was trickling water over the waterfall even at that time in the summer. The canyon had cooled down by about 15° or so; we were in a pretty good place! And we looked at the base of this waterfall and there was about a 7 foot diameter pool at the bottom of the waterfall, no more than 2 feet deep, so it was somewhat dry. You could see how high it had been flowing earlier in the year because there was algae on the side of the rocks. I had no idea that that area even existed, and I had no idea there was water over there. But definitely year-round water, whether it’s flowing or not there is still water there.
So we decided that was where we were going to dig, right at the base of the waterfall in the plunge pool. And me, being the new-be, I was given the shovel and had to do the digging. So I start shoveling. There’s about 2 feet of water in this spot and I’m standing in it digging material up and putting it in the Home Depot bucket. The material is a mix of gravel and sand, and I’m just pulling this material out of the pond as I dig my hole. And what I’m doing is I’m putting it in the bucket and then my buddy James is taking it from the bucket and putting it into his pan and using this plunge pool water to pan it out. He’s also kind of teaching me how to pan as well. By this time I had learned a little bit by watching YouTube videos so I was fairly versed at being able to have a gold retrieve in a pan if there were any flakes to be had. But he was far more experienced than I was, so I had no problem letting him do the panning.
So I was digging stuff up out of this pool, and finally I would say that we dig up about three full buckets of material and managed to go through it and on the very last bucket James was panning this material out and at the bottom his pan there was something pretty heavy. So he’s washing everything off and he finally pulls out these two chunks about the size of quarters. It was gold! It looked like it had been melted down and melded into a coin like fashion. It was definitely not natural but we could tell it was gold by the weight of it and by the way it was malleable and it would move whenever you would bend it. He took it by his teeth and he bent it and he could tell it was gold. And we were like—wow–how did this get here? It was definitely not natural it must have flowed from one of the mines, perhaps one of the camps where they were melting gold down and they lost it. That’s the only way we can figure it got there. How else could it get there? It definitely didn’t form naturally that way. Maybe years of rain and flash floods and covered up by more and more material and then washed over the waterfall. And when the waterfalls going on it is being churned up and working its way towards the bottom and we just happen to be digging in the right place at the right time. It was very interesting and exciting. We found little specks of gold but it was mainly just flood gold in small little specks and nothing that valuable, but those two doubloon sized pieces of gold were the real treasure of the trip. The gold look like it had been melted down. There was no face and it wasn’t a perfect circle. It was thicker in some areas and thinner and others. It was a little rough and there were what looked like little divots in it as if gravel had been pushed into it. I would say definitely it had a rough feature to it. I would say they were about 2 mm thick. Someone must’ve had a very bad day when they lost it!
We came to the spot that James had picked out and it was all James’ equipment and so he was able to take both of those pieces of gold home. I was just there for the experience. I was just a digger! But I’ve been meaning to get back out there again. I’ve got a call up James and see if we can plan a date. That was my first experience it was a very good experience to have. It got me really excited about gold panning!