Summer Wrap Up

The summer of 2010 is one I'll remember for a good long time. The weather was great, the camp site was ideal and the friendship was more valuable than gold. Our friend, "The Guide", gave us valuable lessons, good instructions, good humor and an opportunity to work a high grade placer deposit. Butch and I returned twice more since the July 25th trip and worked downstream of our guide's diggings, per his request. On each trip, on our last afternoon before leaving for home, our guide materialized from the timber and offered us free reign to his diggings so that we wouldn't go home without a good showing of gold.

Pictured to the left is a spot that kept my interest high. This bedrock crack payed me 55 chunky pieces of gold in one pan within the area circled. That's only about a foot in length. I chased the crack further toward mid-stream but it didn't pay as well as it did within the circled area. On our last visit, that bedrock crack drew my attention once more. This time I chased it toward shore, pulling some clay from the bottom. I continued following the crack to the creek bank. The crack jogged to the left and then jogged to the right and continued under the bank. I couldn't see what I was doing so I had to feel my way along the crack, pulling material from the crack as I progressed further.

Here's a sight you don't see often. This is the yield from one sample pan taken from the material in the bedrock crack a foot under the creek bank.
I took the time to do a count and including the few pieces of -30, the total came to 72 pieces. This is what the old timers used to get from their pans when they were working virgin ground 150 years ago. When you see this in your pan, it's like you went back in time and are re-living those days of old. I'm never in a hurry to remove the gold from the pan when my pan looks like this. It's always good to take a few moments to reflect and give thanks.

Here's another sight you don't see often. Butch was screening down some ¼" material and just as he was ready to discard the tailings, he took that extra few seconds to review the classifier one more time. He said "Bob, check this out". I grabbed my camera and recorded it as a reminder to both of us to not get lazy with our classifying.

The two pieces were wedged in pretty tight but with the aid of a pair of tweezers, they finally found their way into Butch's sucker bottle.

We both checked our classifiers every single time we did a pan after that, but of course you know how that goes...no repeat performance.

The picture to the left represents the Summer of 2010. Four pennyweight of nice chunky gold all recovered without the aid or use of motorized equipment. Our recovery tools consisted of shovels, scoops, brushes, crevice suckers and gold pans. All of this would not have been possible without the generousity of our friend from Elk City. If the Good Lord is keeping score, our friend tallied up extra bonus points this summer with his 'no strings attached' kindness. Within the gold mining community, this guy is a gem!

Next blog entry will have me back on the Clearwater so stay tuned.