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| It may not look too big, but the biggest piece of gold in this pan is the largest I have found to date! |
I headed up to the North Fork of Clear Creek Canyon this last saturday for some snowy prospecting. Missing out on a powder day at the resorts, I hoped that prospecting might have me bringing back some gold. I spent about six hours digging and sluicing only one bucket of bench deposit material. Bench deposits were left on the sides of the river, way back when the river had not eroded down to its current location. These deposits usually weren't worked by the old-timers, and sometimes can have lots of gold left for us! I spent all six hours on this day digging and sluicing one ONE bucket of material! My sluice wasn't set up right, and the riffles would pack full of fine sand and clays. I was watching my gold come in at the top, set up in a riffle, and walk its way right down into the river bed. For some reasoning, I didn't want to run a clean up and re-set up the sluice twice, I already had once because I had felt it wasn't working right, so I kept running material through and watching the gold exit. My first clean-up held two small flakes, right on the lip of the sluice after I pulled it out. The next one held a slightly bigger flake, and then the biggest flake (almost a nugget?) that I have found to date. Don't get too excited, its still very small. But I am excited, I feel that if I dug the same material with a well-working and bigger sluice, I could probably extract a decent amount of gold.
