Yep, one more gold prospecting adventure to share...
Back to the Arkansas River, just South of Buena Vista, at the BLM Elephant Rock campground area. I last creviced & hand panned the Arkansas River in July, a little further North, at the GPAA claims block at the old Railroad bridge area, but found the water still too high & fast to get as deep into the riverbed as I wanted...
....but, now the river is as low and slow as I have ever seen it. So, I parked, walked to the river thru the Pinion pines and surveyed the prospects. Up river seemed much better as to big boulders, boulder fields and such to look for any exposed bedrock and places to crevice.
I hiked upstream a ways and using my BIG forged steel fencing bar, I proceeded to pry cracks & crevices apart, and hand pan the small amounts of dirt, sand & clay. Hmmm......as I feared, some black sand & a few tiny specks of gold, but nothing big.
I kept looking for bedrock, but in this rapids section of the river, it was lost of big rocks and a narrow boulder field on both sides, with very little gravel bars.
My big bar allowed me to pry some inpressive chunks of rock up, off & out. Still, nothing more than specks. Hmmm......
I decided to simply hand pan several pans of gravels, mud, muck behind a riffle like rock in the stream bed, and on the 2nd pan got more small specks & flakes than my first 2 hours of crevicing.
The day was absolutely beautiful....sunny, warm, cool/clear water, light breeze... I worked my way downstream, had lunch under a tree. Across from me was a BIG boulder, which had some big cracks in it, and I pried off sections & panned the dirt, hoping for maybe a few big flakes, stuck in there from floods years past. Nope. Just a few specks.
O.K., I walked down stream and at the campground access point I met a nice couple hand panning. We talked, I gave a few pointers, as they were somewhat new to prospecting, recommended Cache Creek for a different experience. After panning 1 pan with them I moved on...
Shortly after that a couple in kayaks beeched next to me, to have lunch, and we struck up a conversation. The guy hadn't gold panned before, so I offered to show him. Right next to us was a large bunch of willow like trees, with a small sample hole in the root ball.
I explained how they can act like a water "speed brake" during floods, letting flood gold fall out, and shure enough, the first pan I dug had decent specks & flakes!
I let the guy dig his pan, pan it out, and he did a really nice job panning too... Yep, he got a nice array of specks & falkes as well. I think he's hooked! 
A group of other kayakers showed up, and they departed downstreal in their pod. Nice to share prospecting with others that enjoy the river....be it swimmers, fisherman, kayakers...I went downstream just a little further and spied a huge boulder with very large rocks on top. Hmmm...so, I pried off the biggest slab and panned the dirt & gravel beneath. Well, a LOT of old lead bullet fragments, and just a few specks. It was a good heavies holding point, just no big gold.
Another shot of the river with the Aspens turning yellow at higher elevations:
I was about pooped out by now, had enough sun, so I went back up to the willow root ball hole, panned a few more pans and decided to call it a day about 4:30PM. I didn't get skunked, but I sure didn't find any big gold holding in any of the cracks & crevices I imagined & hoped for...
Here's my gold:
My conclusions after talking to some long time suction dredgers and my 2 crevicing outings is the Arkansas doesn't have much larger gold, mostly a lot of flood gold as specks & flakes, so sluicing is a better recovery option. Find a good gravel bar or bank material deposit & just run as many buckets as you can! Still, it was an awesome day on the Arkansas river.
Here's the first of two short YouTube videos I made to help capture the day:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW_Qwv-B ... ature=plcp
Thanks for coming along, hope you get out soon too!
God bless,
Randy "C-17A" www.goldadventures.biz
John