Panning & Sluicing Adventure - Part 1

[Condor]

The River

I spent several weeks in early July, panning and sluicing on the N. Fork of the American River.  I've been going to the same 10 mile section of the river for over 20 yrs.  That part of the river is designated Wild & Scenic, so no motorized equipment and no claims.  It's one of the few places in CA gold country you can access a free flowing river without stepping on someone's gold claim.  Access is not easy, although there a a number of trails up and down the river.  They're all rugged, often steep and always overgrown with poison oak.  I have often encountered "locals" who at various times attempt to eke out an existence by panning and sluicing the river.  Generally friendly and sometimes willing to share local knowledge of the gold.  When I meet them I make a point to brew up a big pot of spaghetti and feed all comers.  Many years ago, I met a guy my age driving a new Jeep Cherokee.  He was socially awkward, but I learned he was a software engineer from the Silicon Valley and had taken up gold prospecting on weekends.  He was not very successful, so my 6 yr old son and I invited him to come dig in a hole we had started.  He sluiced a few buckets and declared that was more gold than he had ever found.  Skip ahead 10 years, I found him living in a tent on the banks of the river having spent 2 years pursuing the golden dream.  He was eking out an existence and seemed to be perfectly happy.  Imagine a 6 mile hike uphill, just to reach a paved road, hope for a ride to town to get supplies then repeat the process back down.  Supplies are limited to what you can afford and carry on your back. The local mining supply store pays 80 percent of spot, for good clean gold.  This guy still had the math and engineering brain so he could tell me exactly how much he was earning per hr, although he did not factor that it was in fact a 24 hr a day job, living on the river. 

Every now and then "flatlanders" discover the place and bring down a bunch of gear intending to strike it rich.  They are soon disillusioned and I find their gear stashed in the woods.  I've seen one sleeping bag stashed in the same spot for over 4 years, untouched.  Buckets and digging tools get carried away by spring floods and I find them littered on gravel bars.

Access

There is an old mining road ,overgrown, heavily rutted, washed out and frequently blocked by blown down timber.  It currently takes me about an hr to travel just over 3 miles down that road crawling in 4 wheel drive low locked in 1st gear.   At one time you could drive to within 100 yds of the river.  There was a fabulous camping spot under a massive oak, with a spring nearby.  In their infinite wisdom, the BLM blocked the road about 1.5 miles from the old camping spot.  They brought in some heavy equipment and dug tank traps to block all future traffic down the road.  For many seasons I hiked the rest of the way down on a variety of trails.  A few yrs ago, my son, then strapping teenager and I started hacking an ATV trail around the tank traps.  We spent a few hrs a day for over a week cutting a new trail.  It's passable by ATV to this day, but you really have to know the danger spots or slide right down the hill.  I've winched my own ATV up that zone many times. 

 

More to come in Part II.....

[Condor]

Part II

Every year I devise some new scheme to get the gold out of that river.  One year I even set up a gravity dredge with 60' of 4'' hose.  It worked fine, but it really takes 2 people to manage it.  If you get a blockage it's an absolute bear to drag that hose out, shake out the blockage, then get it all back in the water and re-charge the suction. 

This year I decided to just concentrate on the flood gold and work less hard.  During the past winter I watched various You-Tube videos of the guys on the beaches trying to capture fly speck gold.  I figured I could find a decent inside bend of the river and dig the easy stuff off the banks.  My plan got a little further complicated when my girlfriend decided she would like to join me for 10 days on the river.  Mind you, this is rough, dry camping.  Since the BLM roadblock, the only camping space is an old helicopter landing area, over a mile from the river with no local water source, and certainly no toilet facilities. 

I traveled ahead by 4 days to set things up and she would fly into Sacramento.  I set up a decent camp, stand up room tent with an inflatable queen bed.  I had pre-positioned bear spray easily accessible under the awning and in the tent, just in case.  I set up a potty area with one of those toilet seats you put on a 5 gallon bucket.  I bought the potty bags that help keep the mess in order for later disposal.  I found a decent gravel bar with about a half mile walk from where I could park the Rokon,  cleared the trail of poison oak and set up a portable shade and a chair on the gravel bar.  The only real hazard was a steep section of trail with about a 50' drop, with the trail littered with dry oak leaves.  They can be like stepping on roller skates in that kind of terrain, but I did the best I could. 

She arrived and on the drive down the nasty washed out road she started to wonder what she had gotten herself into, but she was game and soldiered on. I pointed out the poison oak all around the camp and cautioned repeatedly, "don't leave the trail". 

So it was for the next 10 days.  We rode double on the Rokon and only crashed 4 times, all at low speed and generally into the blackberry bushes.  No major injuries, minor scrapes, bruises and stickers.  The hike proved to be a challenge, particularly the nasty 50' steep section.  She developed a pattern of places to stop and catch her breath and take a drink of water.  She likes to think she works out at the gym, but this was a bit different.  I kept telling her, "it's the cardio", you'll get used to it.  She didn't weigh 130 lbs soaking wet when we started, but managed to lose 7 lbs in the 10 days on the river.  In the river I had a net bag of beer, soda and water.  I carried fresh snacks down everyday so it really was paradise, kind of.  I would drive the Rokon down to the spring every evening and fill up a 5 gallon tote bag of water for bathing.  I'd heat up enough and fill a bucket with warm water.  We used a gatorade bottle with the top cut off as a scoop to pour water for our shower.  The bear only visited once.  I carelessly left the trash out and there he was.  I scared him off and didn't have to use the bear spray.   At the end of 10 days, my girlfriend had to fly home reluctantly. 

In Part III, I'll talk about the gold....

[Condor]

For those who don't know me, I'm 64 yrs old, but don't feel a day over 63.  My girlfriend while younger, is not overly so. 

[Dig It]

Don't forget to add a few photos..... Always fun to see what folks are writing about. Fun read ……….

[Condor]

OK, I found my camera.  Regrettably, I don't take many pictures, but there's enough to get the overall picture.  I don't know how many I can load at one time, stick with me though.

#1 is the Rokon carrying my frame pack with gear to take down to the river.

#2 is our spike camp on the gravel bar

#3 is one of my holes on the gravel bar

#4 4X4 trying to get down my ATV trail

I'll do the rest when I finish the write up on the gold

[beatup]

Great looking spot you guys were at Steve , you have got  that rokon looking like quite the adventure bike. I am so envious right now all i have done is work on ditchs and just today was up in the mountains doing a water release from the resivore,all my buds here have been over in the Blacks hills dredging  every weekend all this month and i am stuck reading yours and other's posts and looking at my buds gold.Sure does look like fun to be out there.Thanks for sharing.

[Condor]

Part III

Gold

As it turns out there is tiny -100 mesh gold just about anywhere you stick the shovel.  In any pan you're likely to see 3 or 4 tiny specs of gold and a lot of black sand.  The problem is as old as time, find a concentration and figure out a way to recover it.  What I discovered on the gravel bar was a thin flood layer about 4 inches thick under about 8 inches of overburden.  The layer was distinct because it contained mostly sharp cornered gravel rather than typical rounded river gravel and it contained a lot of mud/silt/clay binding the layer together.  Once you get a decent hole started you can chase the layer, pushing the overburden in behind you.  A typical pan of this material is likely to contain 30 to 50 colors, mostly -100 all the way down to -400.  I had a pocket magnifier and looked at this stuff under 100x magnification.  It's incredible, but you really have to get a lot of it to have any real weight.  It really looks impressive when you have to black sand to highlight it, but when you pan off the black sand this stuff will float right out of the pan.  

I had reconfigured my Gold Cube to be more of stacked sluice, capable of handling 1/4 inch material.  I added Deep V black matting to the top tray, one of the new esoteric "catch it all miracle" mats to the second tray and Deep V in the 3rd tray.  The top tray was catching 90 percent of the gold, so I only cleaned the bottom trays at the end of the day.  I would dig 2 buckets (4 half buckets for carrying ease) classified down to 1/4 inch then run it through the Cube.  Photo 1 is what typically I would get out of 2 buckets.  I would pan it down to the black sand and if there were any pickers I take them out and dump the concentrates into another bucket for later processing.   After a couple days it was clear that this type of gold production wasn't going to change my lifestyle much.  The most I ever ran was 10 buckets.  After a few days I panned off the +50 mesh gold for 2.87 grams.  Clearly I wasn't going to get rich on this project.  But, it was better than being home in Yuma at 118 degrees.  My girlfriend would occasionally get energetic and help shake the bucket classifier, but she was satisfied sitting in the shade reading.  I figure I was getting about 1 gram of gold per day, working a couple hrs, then swimming, fishing etc.  A more dedicated person with a sluice tuned for beach type gold could obviously do much better.

After she left, I started exploring and sampling in more remote areas.  A lot of hiking and the best I found was an area with all this riverside sedge grass growing right on the bedrock.  It involved a rigorous hike on a very narrow trail overgrown with poison oak.  I stuck to panning because I didn't want to haul much equipment in there.  An unbalanced pack on that steep trail might have been disastrous.  The roots of this sedge were like natural miner's moss.  They were so tough I chopped them with a hatchet them shredded them up in a bucket of water.  It might take an hr to get 1/4 bucket of this material, but it was so rich in fine gold.  In photo #2 is the gold I took out of one pan from a crack under the sedge roots.  Unfortunately, there just weren't many of those.  The weather had turned really hot, so I would sit on a ledge waist deep in the water and pan out my 1/4 bucket.  Again, I would pan down to the black sands then save it in a concentrate bucket.  After I got tired of panning I would have to waste time until the sun set enough for the long hike back to my Rokon. 

Again, if I had been serious with the right equipment, I could probably get 3 or 4 grams a day until I ran out of sedge grass. 

So, after 3 weeks I decided to go get some big gold at Rye Patch, and we know how that turned out. 

 

 

[Rege-PA]

Wow Steve! Looks like a good time on the river. I would like to try to liberate some of that concentrate on my Miller table. It could be the ticket to getting the gold out.

We`ll talk later......

[Condor]

16 minutes ago, Rege-PA said:

Wow Steve! Looks like a good time on the river. I would like to try to liberate some of that concentrate on my Miller table. It could be the ticket to getting the gold out.

We`ll talk later......

No problem Rege,

I'd love to see what happens on the Miller Table.  Give me a call with the physical mailing address.  I might have the address for the Archery Shop.