Well..........hope "you all" had a great Christmas & wish everyone the absolute best New Year and 2012...
I had the opportunity to take my family of 4 to California to celebrate Christmas with family & friends...........live out of a suit case, drive a lot and have a blast reconnecting back home...
Hey, like a good prospector, I took (made) the opportunity to get out of the house a couple times to go out prospecting and here's the short story:
1). First chance out -- Wednesday 21 Dec 11. My brother-in-law Steve suggested we all go to the Santa Cruz mountains, up near the big redwood tree country and check out the San Lorenzo River, near the Henry Cowell State Park. Seems in years gone past there was a hardrock gold mine close by, and the area we hiked was known as Gold Gulch. That's a great sounding place to dip a pan and walk off some excess eating...
I looked at the river as we walked and selected a spot at a river bend, and dug into the root ball of several trees. I panned out several pans and got a goodly amount of black sand, but no color.
Further down the hike we came across a nice little feeder creek and it looked pretty prospective... I dug into the bank right at the water line and creviced in the moss covered bedrock and washed it all in my pan.
Yep, nice black sand but again no gold. Oh well, I tried. This area is not known for gold, but hey......gold is where you find it!
The afternoon was clear, cool, and fun as we all talked, hiked and looked forward to Christmas day...2). Second chance out -- Friday 23 Dec 11. O.K. I needed to get a "man day away" from all the shopping, eating and couch time....Steve agreed to hit the hills again with me and join up with this younger brother, Jeff, and prospect on the SF & MF of the Tuolumne River in the Stanislaus National Forest Southwest of the Yosemite National Park. It took us about 2 hrs and 30 minutes each way. Steve & I went there almost 3 years to the day in December 2008 (see my Dec 2008 Trip Report) and we braved the ice & snow & cold and panned & sluiced and found some color on the MF Tuolumne River.
Up at O'Dark 30, we left at 6AM from San Jose and drove to a spot East of Chinese Camp & Groveland. Arriving after sunrise on the SF of the river we found it below freezing and the river very, very icy and cold. Guess it had been in the low 20's most nights recently.
We suited up in waders & cold weather gear and proceeded to pan, crevice and prospect as we could, given the totally frozen river bank material. See Steve & Jeff below in the parking lot...that's white frost all over the blacktop!
I found one spot where water seeping in kept the crevice unfrozen. I dug it over and over.......rusty nails, pennies, lead sinkers and some fine gold specks & flakes.
However, after about 1 hour of hard diggin' and trying, we decided to head about 1/4 mile over to the MF Tuolumne River and pan & sluice the same spot we worked in 2008. Arriving there we found almost no snow, but just as cold & frozen.
I set up Steve's Le Trap sluice in the river and we went to work looking for gold.
The ground above the water line was basically concrete........frozen solid. So, we dug below a old dead tree's rootball, where many others had worked in the past, and found the material ablut 2 feet down not frozen, so we sluiced that mostly.
Steve worked up stream as Jeff & I panned & sluiced. It was Jeff's first ever gold prospecting "adventure", and boy did he do good.
No stranger to hard work & willing to pitch rocks, chop frozen ground and pan over & over...
We basically sampled all over, but the frozen ground limited us severely...I got four 5-gal buckets sluiced, creviced and panned. Jeff sluiced and hand panned as well.
Here's Jeff & Steve...
Steve panned mostly throughout the day, until the end of the day, but ran the last of his material thru his sluice at about 4:30PM as the sun was just about gone.
In the end, we had a awesome "man day away"........creviced, panned, sluiced and generally had great fun despite the cold high mountain temps. Jeff got a great intro into prospecting on is first ever prospecting trip and some nice color to take home to his family.
Here's our gold:
Jeff also dug up a 5-gal bucket of material from beneath a big rock in the river to take home and pan.
So, in all I had a blast prospecting California again...
Hope "you all" get out wherever you are, despite the winter weather, and dip a pan and have a gold adventure.
Here's the two YouTube videos for your viewing pleasure:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb71tZIr ... xaL6luYvjv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B33OSZ6 ... RZn7zPuMPs
Randy "C-17A"
www.goldadventures.biz
