One more Trip Report here from High Colorado.....before Fall turns into Winter and all is too frozen, cold to go dig in the hills....
Plus, my Gold Cube report # 2 as well.
My goal this trip was to try a little experiment, which was to try and move max 2 1/2 gal pails of gulch material and sluice it fast as possible in my plastic Le Trap sluice, doing a clean up between every bucket. I'd dig, sluice, and hump it up the gulch for another bucket, when I came back, clean up, and shovel the material in as fast as I thought the sluice would handle it, and then keep the process going...
So, Saturday 8 Sep 12 was that day. Left the house at 7:30 AM at 38 degrees. Got to Cache Creek, it was colder. At the creek the bushes & creek grass were covered in frost! Brrr...as I'd left my sweatshirt in the Jeep, as in the past I'd warmed up from diggin & the sun would warm me up fairly quickly. Still, a short-sleeved shirt only was a bit nippy!
Set up and sluicing like a machine by 8 AM.
4 buckets in the 1st hour, 4 buckets in the 2nd hour. Slowed down to 3 buckets in hours 3 & 4, as the gulch material was harder to dig, I had to pitch a lot more rocks, and the material now had a lot more magnetite, which made me strip it off twice each 2 1/2 gal pail.
I stopped for lunch at noon. Awesome day, clear, sunny, warmed up nicely...probably 70 degrees. One very cool thing was about 10:30AM, as I sat on my chair, a Sharp-Shinned Hawk flew just over my left shoulder, maybe a foot or two over me from up the creek behind me, carrying a bird in its left talons. It landed about 30 or 40 feet up stream on a dead willow branch. The large, bright yellow & black bird in its claws looked to be a male Western Tanager, which I see frequently around the area.
He sat there for a good minute, me totally motionless, enjoying the beauty of this small raptor. Wish I could have taken some pictures of it! Anyways, it decided it needed a more stable perch to eat its meal, and flew off further up the creek, about a foot over the water.
I kept sluicing unti ablut 3 PM and then did a final clean up bucket in the gulch, using my crevice tool & 2 brushes to really clean/sweep the decomposing granite bedrock. I got in 20 buckets for the day......or 10 5-gallon bucket equivalents of dirt.
I'd hoped for a nice big flake or picker lying on the bedrock, but again, not to be. I hand-panned this material and did find some nice small specks & flakes, but nothing like you'd expect in a creekbed that actually ran water on a regular basis. Oh well, that's Cache Creek...fine gold, widely dispersed, so just move the most of the best material you can! I can see why the old timers decided to hydraulic the valley...
I hiked up out of the valley about 3:30PM with 28 lbs of heavy black sand cons and all my stuff. I ran them at home Sunday afternoon thru my new Gold Cube.
Here's the amount of cons in each tray, after running 28 lbs. The lower tray had a few small light weight granite stones, otherwise pretty much the same amount...
Again, the Gold Cube did an amazing job in just minutes on my cons. The upper tray caught 98% of the fine gold, saving me hours & hours of very hard hand panning.
Upper tray gold catch:
Lower tray gold catch:
I am VERY impressed with "The Cube" so far. Now to somehow get it into the creek with me to run material directly in the field, not just cons at home in my garage. Need a small solar panel I think...
Oh, on the way out of Cache Creek I finally decided to pull over, walk over to what looked like an old water ditch several hundred yards out in the sage brush, the old miners dug to bring water to a section they washed for gold on the North side of FR 398. Yep, an old water ditch. Man, they sure worked HARD back in the day to mine this place. On the walk back I came across a small dump looking area of old rusty tin cans, broken glass bottles, battery parts, debris, etc., in the sage brush. Looked to be 1930s depression era junk. A pic here of the cool items. Liked the stamped metal tape dispenser... Two things surprisingly looked to be kid's toys....one a small double wheel set for maybe a girl's doll carriage and the other a stamped tin boy's toy, like maybe a road grader? Kids WAY out there, in the hills?
Guess miners had families even in those days, struggling to live, survive....kind of like today.
I took 2 short videos. Posted both on YouTube on my Channel. First one here for your viewing/enjoyment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYeFZguX ... ature=plcp
Anyways, hope you enjoyed this "gold adventure" and Gold Cube report.
Off to the hills soon, for another go at the gold, to enjoy nature and hope you too get out and create you own memories & post us all a Trip Report here on the Gold Adventures Forum...
God bless,
Randy "C-17A"
http://www.goldadventures.biz