Well, got off to a good start in 2016, only three days into the new
year and I have already found some gold.
Sunday Jeff and I decided to head up the hills and do a little
prospecting. There's a section of the river that we have been looking at,
we're not sure if it's a high bench or a old channel. But we've been
looking at it for a couple years now and we decided to give it a try.
We got off to a later than normal start because it's been so cold in
the morning, we decided to get up there around 9 or 10 after it had
warmed up a bit. We got up there about 9:30, grabbed our packs and
started hiking up stream. We hadn't gone too far when we came across
a spot, where someone had been digging earlier. Whoever was digging
had moved quite a pile of gravel, they had thrown the gravel off to side
of the hole. I decided to run my detector over to pile. I was very happy
when we uncovered the first piece of gold of the new year. I really love
it when somebody does all the digging for me. After thoroughly
checking the area, we moved on to our designated destination.
I detected this area about a year ago. I found two small pieces of
gold and two old pennies. So naturally, having found gold before, we
started hunting in the same area. After about an hour of detecting and
no gold I decided to try digging out some gravel from around the large
boulders. The gravel was pretty much cemented in place, and digging
was slow going. After cleaning out a small area of bedrock, I detected
the gravel I had dug out, nothing! Then detected the bedrock I had
exposed. On the newly exposed bedrock I got a good signal. It was
another small nugget about .5 dwt. Just a bit smaller than the first one
we found.
We did a little more detecting but found nothing more than a 22
bullet and few small pieces of wire. At that point we took a break and
worked on a plan to enable us to expose more bedrock. With the size of
the boulders and the packed gravel, this area is not gonna be easy to
work! But to evaluate whether not it's worth working, we're going to
have to process quite a bit more gravel than we did today. After
forming a preliminary plan we backed up and headed towards the
truck.
We were in pretty good spirits, after all it was only a third day of the
new year and we had found 1.2 dwt of gold! Best part is, we have a
whole year ahead of us to get more gold out of that gravel bank.
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