A wildfire in the gulch to the North had been spreading quickly, and on my drive up I witnessed some of the power and proximity of this fire. The canyon is curvy, and the hills on the side are steep. As I drove along on the road, without any cars around, I noticed that on the top of the ridge the trees were actually on fire. A 20' pine tree was a ball a flames, and the ground around it had 4-5 foot flames all around. It was absurd to think that the forest was burning right there so close to the road. I got another mile or two up the canyon to where I spotted a Jeep that I recognized as a man, David that I had met one other time before on the North Fork of Clear Creek.
I parked and walked down to where he was working. After doing a little sample panning, I decided on a spot on the upper part of this placer bar behind a large rounded boulder. The spot was showing a few specks a few feet down, but nothing too promising. I wasn't too far from David, and we would chat every once in a while about the history of the area, and our theories on the gold. After an hour or two, police sirens on the road caught my attention. A Jefferson County sheriff was yelling at us to leave, because the canyon was closing. We both began hurrying to clean up and pack our stuff back to our cars. By the time we could pack our stuff up, 3 other officers stopped and yelled at us to leave. David asked if I wanted to go to his hole up the creek and dig there. He said he had been finding small nuggets, and guaranteed that I would too if I came with him. With my doubts, I followed him to his spot (which he asks I do not share the location of) where he had quite a large hole dug. Surrounding these boulders buried deep in the river, he said he had been getting the gold.
I began to dig, which wasn't easy because the hole was so deep and the footing precarious. My thigh-high waders were about an inch away from being filled in with cold, cold water, and in late March, the air temperature isn't quite optimal for swimming. I sluiced out all of my material, without seeing any gold that I could get too excited about. As it got dark, I cleaned up my sluice, and as I washed the top material into the bucket, there it was!
A Nugget!
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| My first decent sized piece of gold. It hasn't traveled very far, and is almost wiry. |
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| Another day's work. Its not easy, but nobody said it would be. |
