Well, hadn't been down to the Arkansas River in quite a while...
....so, went yesterday afternoon to take a look and try some river sluicing for fine Colorado flood gold.
We've had several days of summer monsoon moisture and quite a bit of rain in the previous 2 days, so I was not surprised to see the river was actually up from the last time I was there.
The water was pretty clear, a nice thing, but gushing along like a big dog. It was challenging to find a spot that would be safe enough to sluice, and not have my sluice wash away when my back was turned and close to a spot I wanted to dig/run river bed material...
I finally settled on a spot in the shade next to a BIG boulder. My sample pans of the gravel and dirt compacted around the boulder showed some color, so that was the spot for a few hours.
I spent a good 20 minutes finding & pitching rocks into the river in order to build up a nice, solid rock table, just under the rushing water to setup my Le Trap sluice. Finally...........I got it close enough. The water was flowing a little fast thru the sluice for my liking, but everything I tried to slow it down...rocks, sticks, combinations of both just upset the water flow, so I opened it up and ran it deep as possible to let the water at least flow smooth, in a non-turbulent fashion.
O.K. I dug sand & gravel & dirt from around a big boulder with my pry bar and shovel. This was slow and tough going. I could tell due to the compacted nature of the "dirt" and how hard it was to dig this was old time material... So, maybe it had a good showing of fine flood gold, built up over the years? Only time would tell...
The day was awesome. I got there about 11AM and started sluicing my first pail about 11:30AM as pod after pod of rafters & kayakers floated by my position.
There were so many rocks in this material, plus being wet & clayish I didn't even try to use a 1/2 inch screen....just dug, pitched out the bigger rocks and hand washed everything handful after handful in the flair using my blue PVC coated gloves. This worked out well, but is a little slow and tedious.
There was good black sand in this material, which gave me hope, but most would wash out due to the slightly higher water volume & speed. I hoped the gold, if any, would remain in the drop riffles...as it always has in the past.
I sluiced until about 1 PM, had a sandwich and a bottle of water and admired the day. Cool, sunny, light breeze, no bugs, blue skies and a few white puffy clouds here & there over the 14K mountain peaks.
Back to work diggin' around that boulder. There a good amount of material up on top of that flat boulder, and I imagined it could have been acting like a false bedrock over the years as flood waters & gold washed over the top, so I focused on cleaning that material real well. When clean I splashed buckets of water to wash it off real well and dug up all the material around the sides and sluiced that, hoping to get any "good" gold it might contain.
About 3PM I was tired, the sun had moved around on me now and I could see a little fine gold in each of the top 3 drop riffles when I came back with another bucket of material, so I knew the water speed wasn't so much that it was washing out the gold. IF it was holding in the first 3 riffles I was confident it was absolutely staying in all the down sluice riffles.
I did a cleanup and packed out about 3:15PM. I noticed that in the 3 1/2 hours I had been there that the river had actually come up about 2 inches on me... My sluice was way under water at cleanup time and the water was now actually flowing around the base of the big boulder I had been digging around. It was high and dry when I showed up... The Ark will probably start dropping down here shortly, as the rain ended a day ago and the forecast is for several warm, sunny days ahead.
I unloaded my equipment back home, panned out mu cons and was VERY pleased to see a nice little amount of very fine flood gold for all my rock pitching, rock diggin', gravel & much washing efforts.
Ended up with 7.1 grains or .46 grams of gold:
So, another successful outing on the river. Hope you get out soon too!
Randy "C-17A"
www.goldadventures.biz
