Barbour Ponds Ice Fishing

On a pleasant friday afternoon, my friend Hamric and I headed to St. Vrain State Park, where the Barbour ponds are located. There are lots of ponds here that hold good fish and good ice for a portion of the year. This was my first time using my own ice fishing gear, including a homemade ice fishing pole, and also using my old auger with new blades.

I pulled my Dad's old hand auger from out of a pile of junk in the shed. My Mom, sister, and myself had probably given it to him as a Christmas gift some years ago. It had been well used until its replacement, the two stroke auger came along. The blades on it were so rusty that they would hardly even scratch the ice. It would have taken hours of effort to bore a hole with those blades that you probably would have had better luck with a pocketknife.

It is tough to recall which ones are old and which ones are new

But for $35 they sell the replacement blades, which can bore a hole like a squirrel on crack going after a peanut butter jar.  While I was buying the blades, I spent a few more dollars on the ice ladle that pulls out all of the chunks remaining from the auger, which is worth it in the long run.

After paying the $7 entrance fee, the attendant informed us that "sandpiper" was fished out, but there were people catching fish on "coot", "mallard", and "bald eagle". The ice was about 4-6", and generally safe.  We drove to mallard and got our gear/beer out on the ice.

Typical Ice Fishing jigs, with quarter for scale.

After being very impressed with the augers first drilling performance, I set up with a small jig with a 1/2 mealworm and splitshot, the typical ice fishing set up. I found the pond to only be around 5' deep. At its deepest we could estimate that it was only around 10' deep.

About 30 seconds after I had dropped my line in, and while I was helping Hamric set up his line, I saw my line run sideways out of the corner of my eye.  When your line moves in the hole, you know that a fish is playing with it down below. I cautiously picked up my rod, and gave it a small tug back. BAM! The fish set, and I pulled it out of the hole. Altogether, I'd had about three feet of line out.

It was a 12" stocked rainbow trout, not more than a minute after having put a lure in the water.

We fished Coot lake and Mallard lake catching lots of fish at each lake. The stocked trout there are hungry. The park ranger who checked our licenses told us that earlier in the year some ice fishers were pulling out 2-300 of these trout per day. Now that would be fun!

Hamric anticipating the next bite.

We caught 8 fish in the few short hours that we were there, and kept seven for a fish fry.

Even thought they were stockers, they still tasted good in trout tacos! The largest we caught was around 15" long.

My next investment into ice fishing will be some cleats. While it isn't too bad slipping around on the ice at first, after just a few hours it becomes annoying. Falling on the ice is painful as I have experienced. Right when you walk away from your pole, which could be after a half hour of sitting with no bites, you look back and the tip of your pole is wiggling. The line is swinging from side to side but you are five feet away. It is impossible to walk, you must dash headlong toward the pole before the fish gets away with your mealworm. But always your feet travel faster than your body without friction against the ice, and you come crashing down on your back knocked windless to lie and watch your line lie still in the water, the fish leaving the hook empty. Long story short, I think i'll make the small investment for some cleats.

All in all, Barbour Ponds in Longmont, CO has some good ice fishing. We were able to take home a nice stringer of fish for dinner and have fun doing it. For the price of $7 and some gas to make the drive from Boulder, it is some decent fishing!

DIY Ice Fishing Pole

After going ice fishing with my Dad, I had seen that some of his poles had been glued together. He explained that these were his broken poles from over the years, salvaged for ice fishing. Hearing this made me think of my broken pole that I was sure I had thrown into the trash.

This fall, I loaned one of my cheap fishing poles to my cousin for a halloween costume. Not too suprisingly, when the pole was returned the lower half had been cracked as to not be cast-able anymore. The cork handle and top of the pole were still intact and entirely functional. I assumed that I had thrown it away, but as I was cleaning my house one day, I lifted a couch and VOILA!

My new ice fishing pole.

It was incredibly easy to make the conversion, I used a few common tools and writing this article has taken longer and required more thinking than making the pole!

What I used:

Adhesive (superglue)
Hacksaw (with masonry blade, but any saw should do the job)
Sandpaper - 250 grit aluminum carbide
Time

Taking the hacksaw, I cut the pole about 4" above the cork grip. I didn't want to cut it too short the first time, and I think it should be more stable with a few inches of overlap between the poles. My Dad's poles were cut right above the cork grip, so anything in between should work as well.

The cut left some nasty little metal and graphite things sticking out that were too sharp and dangerous. The sandpaper smoothed these out quickly.

I put adhesive inside the handle, where the upper pole would go. The upper pole fit inside the handle with about 2mm of extra space around it, just perfect to be filled with adhesive. I put as much adhesive as I could inside, and pushed the upper pole in until it fit snugly against one of the bulging wrappers for an eyelet.

I made sure to align the eyes to the correct position with respect to where the reel would go, and set it aside to cure.

Step into the freezer...

Basal ice from the GISP-2 core. This ice was the second to last meter before hitting bedrock, where sediment has been pulled up into the ice by the flow of the ice

      I spent most of my hours for the latter half of the summer at the National Ice Core Lab, where the current project was processing a 3.3 km long ice core that comes from Antarctica. That was about all that I knew going into the job. Later on, mostly through talking with the PI's and graduate students, I learned that there is much more to this than meets the eye. There have been more than 20 years worth of planning and work that went into this particular ice core.  The concept for a core from Antarctica was first conceived in 1989, when scientists were working on processing GISP-2, an ice core drilled from Greenland. Their work inspired curiosity to see if ice from the other side of the world would show them the same things that they had seen in GISP-2.

Ice Cores drilled over twenty years ago reside here at NICL in a -46 C deep freeze

As the cores are brought out of their tubes, they are measured and aligned according to how they were marked
in the field.

     These scientists, such as Kendrick Taylor and Mark Twickler, spent years obtaining radar profiles, mapping the bedrock below the ice, and looking at the rates of flow in the ice. When influenced by gravity, ice behaves fluidly, and actually flows. The motion is described in introductory geology texts as being similar to dropping pancake batter onto a hot skillet, where it pools and gains elevation where locally applied, but quickly flows outward. The data that the scientists are seeking would best be obtained from an undisturbed section, where they can be confident that mixing or motion of the ice is relatively low. After several years of research, they found a spot in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, along a divide where the elevation was highest. The ice was thick there, and the bedrock profile showed that there was a large valley surrounded by two distinct and sharply rising mountains on either side. The hope is that in a dome or a divide, the motion of the ice will be low in the center of the feature. As they began test drilling to measure accumulation rates, the site took on its acronym, WAIS Divide.

The Horizontal Saw, also known as the H-saw, cuts two slabs of thicknesses 1.3 cm and 3 cm

     It is important to note here that the science of drilling deep ice cores was relatively untested, if not new,  at the point of conception. During the twenty years of planning to drill this ice core, they had to design and drill their own new drill, invent new instruments to measure the ice, and figure out schematics of living in the harsh ice covered land. They even went to such lengths as to figure out whether or not they could leave their human waste on-site (as it turns out they did, and they have figured that the waste pits will be stretched into a 1cm layer and pulled out to sea). Labs like NICL were constructed to store and process the ice cores that were being drilled from Greenland and Antarctica. The only other time that the U.S. had drilled for ice in Antarctica was at Byrd, a site that was selected because the numbers of its latitude and longitude sounded "nice", and without any consideration to radar profiles or disturbance of the ice. What they came to conclude after drilling and analyzing a core from that site is that folding and mixing near the bottom of the ice had stripped the core of its ability to represent correctly the ancient stratrigraphy, and thus held little scientific value.

   After they had worked out every detail of the drilling, they set out to antarctica for their first field season in 2006. They were only allowed one snow-cat to work with to construct all of their drill shelters and work areas. Drillers who were on the job for all season had quarters, visiting scientists resided in a field of tents specifically designed for the Antarctic. For five seasons of work in the field, they have 3,334 meters of ice core to show for their hard work. That's a hole that descends 3.334 km into the ice sheet. The amazing thing is that the drill only takes 3m of core at a time, and they have to pull up and lower the drill head into the hole each time. The wait times to winch the drill in and out while nearing the bottom of the hole were nearing 12 hours if I recall correctly. They stopped their drilling for fear of what is at the bottom, and for concern for the environment. There is a strong belief that at the bottom, near the contact with bedrock, the ice begins to melt, and sits upon a large body of water. If the drill penetrates the body of water, the drill fluid ( some nasty chemical) will be released into the otherwise untouched body. To keep the borehole open while drilling, they had to pour in some 200 barrels of drill fluid.

     The drilling teams only work during the North American winter, when it is warmest in Antarctica. Weather permits them a relatively short working season, because an ice breaker ship must be able to reach Mc Murdo, which acts a supply point for this camp and others on Antarctica.

The "ECM" or Electrical Conductivity Meter Sends an A/C
and D/C shock through the ice and measures the result

The resulting readout from the ECM

And so, after all of this effort, someone has to be able to use the ice to do some science. Every week at NICL, we would have a scientist give a talk. Usually it was a PI who came to visit, but scientists who were staying the whole summer also gave their talks. There are over nine PI's, or primary investagators that collect samples and run them to receive the data, which is in some cases then handed to another scientist for analysis. Scientists use machines that often times they have built, with complex functions and names like mass spectrometer and accelerated particle spectrometers. They look at a wide variety of things in the ice, including gases, chemistry, isotopes, physical properties, its electrical conductivity, and there is even someone who counts each and every visible layer within the ice. The level of analysis on the core is amazing, we heard from Kees Welton who looks at Beryllium-10 isotopes within the ice as indicating the amount of incoming solar radiation per year of accumulation. His data is correlating quite nicely with known sunspot counts that were visually confirmed and marked in history over the last few thousand years. Scientists used data from Greenland ice cores, other sites in Antarctica, and other outside data, and have proved the existence of several correlations. Most of the data that they analyze comes in the form of squiggly little lines that represent annual or event-based changes, much like the data from the ECM.


   The ice at the bottom of the core was estimated to be around 40,000 years old. This estimation is made from a proposed depth-age scale and from the actual count of the annual layers. One day, we took "snow" from the planer, a machine used to flatten one half of the ice core, and made some snow cones with grenadine and strawberry syrup. We chose the planer because it cuts from mostly the interior of the core where the exposure to the nasty drill fluid is least. I could never have imagined that a 40k year old snow cone could taste so good on a hot day.

The first cut of the chemistry slab is made on an ice core from over 3 km below the surface


The work that I did involved taking a 3 cm thick slab of ice, roughly a meter long and about 12 cm wide, and cutting out of this a 3 cm tall by 3 cm wide stick of ice. This stick of ice roughly a meter long would be shipped to Nevada to be processed with what is called a "continuous melter". This produces a constant flow of meltwater that can be tested as it is melted. By running this melt through several machines that measure different molecules, a large amount of information is obtained from these samples. During cutting, the bandsaws produce "snow" as if they would produce sawdust if cutting wood. This snow must be removed from the samples using a paint brush. This stick then had to be bagged, labeled, and its card correctly stapled onto it in order to be put into a box, which was put onto a pallet to be shipped to the PI. The remaining pieces also had to be bagged and sent to the pack-up station, which returned the remaining pieces of the ice core to the tube in which it came and stores them in the deep-freeze, for the possibility of future research. During the whole process, plastic gloves must be worn to prevent contamination of the core.

Steamboat Springs, Colorado

With a recent 2' snowfall in the higher mountains behind steamboat that just made it deep enough to snowboard, and the onset of fall break, my good friend Henry and I headed up to Steamboat to spend a few days with my friend Aaron.

On the still morning drive up the Poudre Canyon, we saw a herd of bighorn sheep across the river. Of course by the time I had parked the car and gotten out with my camera, there were only two remaining in sight.  Still several of them had quite large horns, and it was quite a good looking herd.

We headed up to buff pass with the snowmobiles in tow. One of Aaron's friends had a snowmobile, and so we had seven people carried by two snowmobiles. The next day, we only had one snowmobile, and so two people would ride on it and three people would ride on their snowboards or skis behind the snowmobile with about 8' tow straps.

The road curves and switchbacks slowly up the mountain, which is quite a nice slope for skiing. Its not at quite a high enough angle to worry about avalanches too much. The snowmobile will drop you off at the top, and you ski down to where the snowmobile again meets you at the bottom. The powder is always untouched and deep, and even if you follow the same line again and again you are guaranteed good turns. 

Powder cat services do the same thing for over $300/day for one person, but we figured out that it had cost us $10 in gas to get the snowmobiles out there, and about $20 in gas to run the snowmobiles for the day, and that is split between 7 people. Its a cheap, fun way to spend the day, if you know people that have snowmobiles.

Henry is getting excited about all the fresh snow.

Red Rocks Canyon National Conservation Area, Nevada

We found it quite easy to visit Red Rocks Canyon National Conservation area. It was an easy 30 minute drive from the strip in our rental car, and we soon found ourselves on the outskirts of town entering into the beautiful landscapes and geology of the basin and range system. My Mom and I took the rental car and headed out of town.

There is the Aztec sandstone, a fine grained sandstone whose color has been altered by passing groundwater. Most usually it is the brilliant red of iron oxide, or a stark white, a color that usually marks the passing of oil through the beds.

There is a grey limestone that belongs to the Bonanza king formation.

Before even entering the park, we stopped at Calico Canyon, a popular spot for boulderers and climbers. We walked in a ways and took in the desert scenery.

At the bottom of the valley there was a conglomerate that had formed. One can imagine how desert flash floods moved these rocks into place. The clasts, or chunks of rock are made up mostly of limestone. The soft matrix is composed of fine grained sand from the sandstone.

The area was popular for climbing, and it was evident why. Tall, house-sized boulders had routes up their corners and the sandstone had cracks and pockets along the steeper faces that begged to be climbed.

Large scale aeolian cross bedding could be seen within these sandstones. This is typical of a sandstone, formed in a desert by the movement of dunes. The dunes' curved front surface is preserved as they move forward, leaving the small curves in the sand that deviate from the horizontal line. These lines are created as the movement of the dune erodes the sand in front of it into a flat surface, leaving the horizontal straight lines.

The area reminded me of the landscapes that Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire spoke of. You could find places to hide here, caves hidden canyons, places in the harsh desert where nobody would come to look for you.

A pleasant sandstone den for someone. Nobody was home when we visited.

The area is also well known for its petroglyphs. This was found right along the trail, and I don't imagine that it is very old. Regardless of its age, though, it is neat. 

We then drove over to the Red Rocks Canyon area. A day pass was was cheap, only $7, and allows you to drive, bike or hike around a 13.5 mile loop. There are many roads turning off that would have been fun to explore, and the hikes you could go on I'm sure would be incredible. We, however got there at around 4:30 PM and they ask you to be in your car and driving out by 5 PM.

When I say that the sandstone is large scale cross bedding, I mean it. Here you can see just how large these are. This is the same sandstone as the red colored one, but it has had groundwater, and possibly petroleum passed through it. The areas of different coloration are created within layers of sandstone that are more or less permeable, so that the color is removed accordingly. This creates the lines that we can see with our eye from far away. Notice the person in the bottom right corner for scale.

We drove around, and wished we had more time to explore the trails. We then headed back to Las Vegas, where you could buy a tall can of PBR or Coor light for an outrageous price.

Or just gamble and drink for free.

Gross Reservoir Fishing

I headed out on the morning of the last weekend of October to Gross Reservoir with my friend Tate. Boulder's first storm had come through the region a few days earlier, dumping 6-8" all around. The shores were still a bit snowy that day, despite the 55 degree day following the snow. It was terribly windy as we got out of the truck, and we bundled up with all of our layers to stay warm. Heading around to the East side of an inlet to get on the leeward side of the wind, we fished the first inlet with everything we had, spoons, spinners and raps. Tate caught two little stockers there, to my none.

I was however more occupied with the quartz crystals I was finding along the shore. Pockets of quartz were visible in the granite, and they were lined with small milky quartz. Broken up pieces of pockets lay all around, some with crystals up to ~1.5 cm.  While most were heavily mineralized by either manganese or possibly a tungstate, some samples didn't have that typical black gunk.

As we moved down the shore, I had been getting a lot more "followers"chasing my lure back into shore, and soon enough caught a nice trout, eating size. The wind had calmed down to just a gusty breeze, and within the sunny areas was it quite pleasant. I thew the trout on a stringer and kept fishing.

Tate caught two more fish, but both were too small to keep. He was using a brown trout rapala and I was using a rainbow rapala when we caught those fish.

We fished around, exploring deeper waters and shallow coves and points, but found that most of the fish were centered around the windiest and widest point with a lot of rocks.

As it seems happen every time, the wind claimed a vast majority of my beer that I brought. Unattended cans somehow act like sails to the wind, ensuring that I only drink about 50% of what I pack in. Lesson learned: bring 2x as much beer as you think you need.

I took "Earl" home to grill. The fish deserved a name after accompanying me around the lake, being plopped in the water every time I stopped to fish and sometimes flung in the snow while I tripped over logs on the snowy shores. But as I gutted Earl, I found that it was a pregnant female fish, who hadn't been finding much to eat lately. Nonetheless, she tasted great.

Right before the snow came I harvested my basil from my garden and made some pesto. With a big glop of this into Earline's belly and some aluminum foil, I was set.

After it came off the grill, I peeled back the aluminum foil, and when the skin comes with it, you know it is done.

After dinner, I walked outside to cover the grill only to find a beautiful crescent moon, a great ending to my fishing experience.

Sluice Concentrates

If you are using a sluice box, at the end of the day you are left with black sand (which is much heavier than the quartz and feldspar sands which are light colored) and hopefully gold in your sluice box. Every attempt is made to easily remove most of the gold next to the river, but there is always some left in the sands and so you bring them home. Thus the predicament that most prospectors are faced with is born, fine gold and black sands.

The combination of the two can be a headache, especially if all you have to work with is a pan.  When I started prospecting, I bought a spiral panning machine that separates gold or heavy materials out, called the Desert Fox.  I came very close to selling the thing, because I was under the impression that it didn't work at all. I would run all of my concentrates at different angles and water speeds and get nothing but black sand, no matter what I did. It took me a while to figure out that there wasn't actually any gold in the material I was running(duh).

Once I actually started bringing home fine gold in the concentrates, the Desert Fox really showed its true potential. I'm now a solid believer that it can separate gemstones or any denser material for that matter, and it can do so quite efficiently when set up proper. Its ease actually allows me time to do work more while I'm at the river, instead of panning out my concentrates where there is water.

My process goes something like this:

When I run material, I use my snifter bottle to pick up gold I can see on the indicator matting. This gives me a peace of mind that the gold isn't going to travel further back into the sluice, where it has a greater chance of getting washed out. Also, I have the bulk of my gold (or so I hope) to pan out at the end of the day, but its always a manageable amount of black sand. Everything else sits in the sluice until a clean-up, where I dump the whole sluice load into a dedicated concentrate bucket.

This represents two days of sluicing. The concentrates come from Cache Creek BLM area by Granite, CO

When I take this home, the first step is to classify the material through a set of screens. The screens that I use are 1/4", 12, 30, and 50 mesh. The mesh size is measured by the number of openings in a linear inch.  I dump the black sands on the screens that are set up on a bucket. I take another bucket full of water and slowly pour it through while shaking to classify it.

All of this material was removed using a magnet. Magnetite retains the magnetic orientation of when it
crystallized due to its atomic structure, and will retain its magnetism for a very long time.

Once classified, I run them in the Desert fox starting with the material between 50 and 30 mesh, and move to the coarser material. Although the machine claims to be able to separate clean gold, I haven't been able to do so without feeling like I have lost some. I always set it up so that it takes a bit of black sands too, that way I can be absolutely sure I have gotten everything I can. When the material is well classified, and with the aid of a magnet, panning the gold from the black sands is a breeze and takes only a minute or two to get clean gold.

Some processed gold from the Desert Fox

Desert Fox doing what it does best.

I'm not sure that this machine can competently separate the fine, fine gold that slips through the 50 mesh screen, so I have been saving this material in a bucket for quite some time now. Ideally, I would like to run it through the Fox and then through a Blue Bowl, because I have heard they are better for this sized material. A Blue Bowl uses spinning water that empties into a hole in the middle of a bowl to allow the fine gold to separate. I would also be willing to invest in screens in the 100, 200 and 300 range, because I'm sure that there is a lot of gold in there that is otherwise practically inseparable.

I almost didn't run my 20+ material through the Desert Fox, because I thought that it might be easier to hand pan. I'm very glad that I did, though. When I was not expecting much gold at all from this material, the big guy on the right jumped out and ran up the spiral. It is my first nugget to register on a scale, weighing in at a massive .1 grams, making its worth around $5 currently.

For two days of moving around 15-20 five gallon buckets of dirt each day, its not a very good paycheck.
For spending two days outdoors, in the sun, and next to a creek with a huge smile the whole time, it is priceless.