Even with the cold 13 degree temps, the gold bug bit and I took a sick day from my physics class. My field geology class had already been canceled for inclement weather, so the day was wide open. Leaving around noon, I hurried up Clear Creek Canyon with sluice, buckets, bar and shovels in tow. Arriving at the locality I had been e-prospecting, I found that it was north facing, coated in snow, and had already seen the most sun for that day. Delightful! To add to the elation, the spot was just downwind of a sewage treatment plant. It looked like there had been lots of past digging in this spot, behind boulders mainly, so I found myself an undug boulder at the top of the placer and started chipping away.
Well, the ground was frozen solid. So I started chipping at the frozen creek, and finally worked up some water. Pouring this on the ground, I hoped, would thaw it enough to be dug, but it just froze within seconds and made a nice little pool of ice.
Scratching that idea, I started pounding the ground with bar and shovel, and managed to work out about a half bucket of material. The material came off of a clay layer about 4 inches down that was frozen solid. Scraping the clay was just like curling very hard chocolate, but you would see gold flakes as they were pulled out! Curiosity finally got to me, and I took a handful of the material and panned it quickly. This one handful had about 9 or 10 finds, well worth the time.
The hard work was keeping me warm, but after about two hours with almost a half-bucket of material and no water with which to sluice, I packed up and headed home. At home, I quickly set up my desert fox-a machine like an archimedes spiral that separates gold and attempted to classify the material, which just separates it all by size. The water froze in the classifying screens, and left me soaked in muddy water and with cold hands. The sun had gone down by then, and the water in the wheel also froze on the desert fox, so there wasn't a chance. I packed it up and went inside, cold and disappointed.
