Bedrock Sniping

Butch and I headed up to our claim on Saturday to do a little sniping. We had been up on the claim two weeks prior but the water was still too high to work.
The only thing we got accomplished on the last trip was me sacrificing my glasses to the river. I was bent over looking at something in the river when my glasses fell off my head. I made a mad scramble with my viewing box trying to locate them before they washed a mile downstream but to no avail. With no glasses, my vision was greatly impaired and any gold in my pan looked like radiant stars. I couldn't tell mica from gold without my glasses so I had to have Butch 'proof read' my pan!!!

Since that trip, I purchased new glasses so I was ready to see some color in my pan. Butch and I have a 40 acre placer claim up in Elk City, Idaho. This trip found us at the head of the claim working just past an inside bend. The first thing we do is locate some promising bedrock structure, then build a wing dam to divert the current and give us some semi calm water to work in. We had just enough current to clear the milky sediment within 5-10 seconds. When we get into some good material, it usually carries a bit of clay so the little bit of current we had worked well for clearing the cloud.We both use our viewing boxes to get a good look at the bottom.

Here's a good shot of some cracks in the bedrock. This isn't at the true bottom yet so they have to get worked. They come apart pretty easily and as small as the cracks are, there is always some material discovered within. That's usually where we find the milky clay material. As soon as we start wedging the crack, a milky cloud will come spewing out of the crack. We keep working away at this structure until we hit a flat bottom and there are no more cracks showing. That's when we know we've hit true bedrock.

As we work our way down to true bedrock, we use our viewing box to help us locate gold in situ. I use a 4" paintbrush to gently sweep away the material from the bedrock and then wait for the milky cloud to dissipate. Now, we spend a lot of time looking and most of the time we don't spot anything, but this trip had me grabbing my camera twice. This first time I saw this little picker waiting to be discovered. I grabbed my camera and moved the viewing box over and snapped a pic shooting through the viewing box.

Here's the little rascal after being retrieved from his bedrock home.

A short time later, while looking at a spot I had just swept clean, I notice this little fella sitting there. I moved the viewing box over and took his pic.

This one has some real character. The gold we find is still pretty ragged so it hasn't traveled far. There are several lode mines up on the hills upriver and that could be the source.

Here's my take from our sniping adventure. Keep in mind that we don't move a lot of material. We shovel off the overburden until we get to the tightly packed gravels near the bottom. ("We don't need no stinkin overburden") Then we use a small scoop to pull the majority of gravel. The final stage is sweeping the floor into a small pile and using our DeserDog sucker tubes to extract the richer pay dirt found at the very bottom.
I want to thank IdahoGoldGettR for turning us on to this 'sporty' way of mining. We learned a lot from him on his claim upriver last year and now it's paying off on our own claim. Thanks Randy !!!