Monday, March 26, 2012

Jan 20 2011 Prospecting

My back is still sore from using Indyme's sluice these last couple days so today I wanted to just do a little bit of panning and hopefully find another good spot to run the Gold Trap sluice with a little more flow and drop then my last spot so I could run it faster, next time I use it.

I had been eyeballing a spot because it has a huge gravel bar with a nice bend in the river and looked like a good spot but I had never stopped there to pan, just walked past it before on the way to other places I knew had some gold. Unfortunately, that spot was pretty bad, only found a couple 60-80 mesh there as the gravel bar was not solid and a shovel would sink in without stopping for several feet. I continued on, sampling every 15 feet or so, and man was I glad I did. I found a nice little spot behind a log under some slate that was just loaded with heavies. First pan I classified was extremely heavy, and when I went to stratify the material, most of the pan was black sand and other big chunks of heavy stuff like lead shot, etc!

Some pictures of the creek:






I knew I was in a good spot so I moved some more slate and Gneiss and tried a spot right behind the log. Which ended up looking pretty good too.



Next couple pans were all pretty good as well.







One of my better pans, and it was from an unlikely spot. It was higher up on the side of the creek the place where the least water was flowing, and yet the best pan of the day from there. It was still kinda behind the log so I am guessing that log created a really nice natural riffle before it decayed away. 
 



Here's a short little video of the creek.

http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/7905/tcx.mp4

Here some more gold from sluicing there:








I put all those bigger rocks back in the creek on the way out, so you can barely tell I was there. Plus I am hoping they will act like natural riffles again and catch more gold if I dont make it back there.