Well, I had the chance to take leave from the Air Force and head to Buena Vista (BV), Colorado, once again in late June to work on my house there, but also squeeze in some great gold prospecting and fly-fish too. This time I decided to take my brand new Wolf Trap sluice, the larger 30-inch/5 riffle model, and try it out on Cache Creek. I ended up working on the house a lot more and prospecting a lot less this year...but, I had success on all fronts.
Day 1: Tuesday, 28 June – Up at 4:30AM and landed Denver IAP at 10:05AM. After getting my rental truck at Enterprise, food at Wal-Mart, it was off on my 2+45 drive I-70 to 470 to 285 to BV. I only mention the route as it takes you right thru Fairplay, CO, and man oh man are there some big & extensive cobble piles just outside town that are left over from the days that a big bucket line dredge worked a LOT of that valley on the S. Platte River. Would love to prospect around Fairplay & Alma some day. They got a LOT of gold there back in the day! What a pretty drive this is....snow up on the hills, antelope out in the open areas, deer, hawks, and such all along the way. The postcard perfect views sure makes the drive go fast...
Arrived BV about 3:30PM, and after getting gas, went to my house. After some unpacking & inspection of the property, I decided to head up to Cache Creek & sluice for some Colorado gold. Arriving there 15 miles north of my house at Cache Creek about 5PM I was all loaded up with sluice & equipment and walking down the steep hill to the creek in short order. What a BEAUTIFUL day it was! The skies were clear, a few puffy white clouds, snow up on Quail Mtn (13,461) and LaPlata Peak (14,336) to the West and Mt. Elbert (14,433) the highest peak in Colorado to the Northwest. The creek was running real high & fast, actually the highest I have seen it in 6 years. I set up my sluice and chair and proceeded up the dry gulch I have worked in for the last 6 years.
I saw that where I stopped digging last August some others had picked up digging, as there was about 3 more feet of material removed into the big elbow bend.
I looked up the gulch and saw where others had been working too in the next dry plunge pool up. I decided to simply start digging where others had left off.
Just like last year, I classified the gulch material with my ½-inch screen, shoveling the material over my Heavy Hitter sluice & rare earth magnets to pull out as much of the heavy magnetite as possible BEFORE sluicing to help keep the riffle bars clean as possible to catch gold. I dug & carried 3 buckets about 100 yards or so to the creek & then did my first clean up. As I panned out the black sands, I could see little tiny flakes riding high on the black sand, not wanting to settle. I had to be careful to not wash them out into the creek, so panning was slow going to say the least. Panning these cons is VERY challenging, with the tiny lightweight flakes/specks & very heavy, dense black sands. However, I was rewarded with some nice fine Colorado gold in my first three 2 gal pails of dirt.
The sun was setting behind the 14ers to the West, but I decided I had time enough to run at least one more series of buckets before going home. The day was great.....about 80 degrees, no humidity, no bugs, violet-green swallows zipping overhead, a red-tailed hawk soaring overhead screaming at my presence in his valley.... After three more buckets of material I did a second clean up. Yep.........more nice little flakes & specks of Colorado gold. Nice... It was 8:30PM and getting somewhat dark, so time to huff & puff with all my gear back up the steep hill below the Granite Cemetery and head for home. No matter what, the thin mountain air at 9,200 feet always takes some getting used to for a low land Georgia boy like me. After about a week, I get somewhat acclimated. Back home, dinner consisting of a huge garden salad, hot pepper rings as garnish & then some Scotch whiskey & great hand-made cigar as the sunset on Mt. Princeton (14, 197) to the South, just 6 miles away.
Day 2: Wednesday 29 June -- Today was to be a full gold prospecting day on Cache Creek, so up at 7 AM, down to BV for a large coffee at the 7-Eleven, and up to Cache Creek at 8 AM. Getting loaded up I met an older couple that was camping there at the Granite Cemetery on BLM land. They explained how they were out having fun, camping, prospecting and sharing the adventure with their son Brian & his daughter Amanda ( I think the names are correct). Brian & Amanda were already down & at the creek sluicing in their home made wooden long tom sluice box. As I approached the creek I saw them upstream from my favorite spot working material from high up on the creek bank. After I was running a while I wandered up and introduced myself and chatted about prospecting & the history of Cache Creek and asked how they were doing finding gold. They were somewhat new to prospecting & panning.....but having fun all the same. I loaned them my clean up tub so they could clean up/wash their sluice cons into it and then hand pan from there.
I decided to try something new this time in the gulch, and that was to eliminate the long 100+ yard trips up/down the gulch to get new material to sluice, and dig at the very bottom of gulch close to where it meets the stream. I simply wanted to take my regular #2 shovel I bought & dig material and feed it directly into the sluice w/o having to classify or walk any further than 10 feet each trip. So, I did. Shovel load after shovel load I carefully & slowly fed the material thru my Wolf Trap sluice. The bigger rocks just tumbled on thru and the heavies started to build up. After about an hour I had a hole about 2 feet around and 1 ½ feet deep. I was on the bedrock in several places, but unfortunately owing to the snowmelt & high water level from the creek, my hole was rapidly filling with water, making seeing, and digging removing material problematic. I did a cleanup and discovered a disappointing amount of fine gold in my cons. Hmmm... I had hoped for just the opposite. I got on my knees and took my hand pick, hand trowel and scooped up a full gold pan worth of bedrock material and sample panned it. Bummer.....just 1 tiny speck. Guess that my location was not as good as I hoped, so I decided to go back up stream and carry buckets where I had bigger, more consistent gold.
So, back to the elbow bend, sluiced 3 more pails, and again found some fine gold specks & flakes. About this time it was early afternoon, and I went back up to see how Brian & Amanda were doing. They were panning out their cons from their sluice. I offered some advice on hand panning, including the “backwash & tap” method. Check out my YouTube video here if you haven’t seen it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cbiiohp5bQ Wow, 135,000+ view so far!
I helped them get their cons cleaned up and used my snuffer bottle and put their gold, plus the gold I had gotten up to that point in my bottle, into a glass 1 TOZ vial and gave it to them to take home and show off to their parents/friends. Always send new folks home with some good gold...
After they left for the day I decided to move up to their spot on the creek before going home, across from a big hole prospectors had dug as they panned & sluiced gold. I simply set up and shoveled material from the big hole directly into my sluice. It was getting late in the day and I wanted to see just how much color was in that spot, having never sample panned that location before.
I shoveled in material for about 30 minutes slowly & carefully and did a quick cleanup, and I did find some fine gold specks & small flakes. Cache Creek has a lot of widely scattered fine gold left over from the massive hydraulic operation there from the 1880s until about 1910 when they got shut down by Colorado’s first environmental lawsuit.
By 4 PM I was pretty tired and ready to head home, get a shower, have dinner & enjoy some more Scotch & a fine cigar on my front porch, and then watch the sun fall in the West & set beyond Mt Princeton, Mt. Yale and Mt. Columbia from my front porch. Really pretty watching the shadows develop & the clouds develop a series of pink, gray & other colorful hues.
Days 3 & 4: Thursday/Friday 30 June/1 July -- no prospecting, unfortunately, as I had to work on the house both days all day. This would let me spend most of the weekend with a prospecting friend, Dave, driving up from C. Springs to prospect Cache Creek with me Saturday & Sunday. Got a phone call from Chad & Will, driving up from Oklahoma, and they were heading for Cache Creek for the weekend. The plan would be to maybe meet up over the next few days and prospect together. No telling with my house work/maintenance & Dave coming up for the weekend as well, but we’d see...
Had a surprise visit from Ron, A.K.A. GoldDawg out of Denver, making his way up to Cache Creek on Friday. He called from Johnson Village, about 2 miles South of BV and I gave him vectors to my house. I was chain sawing up 3 dead pine trees and had to return the rental saw & get my first load to the Chaffee County landfill before they closed at 3:30PM. Otherwise, we chatted as I loaded up tree trunk rounds & branches. I hoped to get up to Cache Creek that next day, if possible, but in the end was delayed making trips to/from the dump. Missed ya Ron, sorry, hope you did well and maybe next trip to Colorado we can prospect together!
Day 5: Saturday 2 July – I discovered that the county dump was to be closed on Monday the 4th of July holiday, so I actually needed to spend Saturday morning making trips back/forth, hauling off three beetle kill pine trees I had cut up with a chain saw. So, Dave headed for Cache Creek to “stake our claim” on a good location below the Granite Cemetery & I proceeded to work my tail off getting rid of the tree rounds, branches & debris. About noon I was done, changed into my prospecting clothes & headed out to find Dave. Arriving about 1:30PM I found Dave sluicing downstream from where the dry gulch joins the creek, at a spot where many a prospector had been digging deep into the North creek bank in various gray, black & rusty orange lagers. He said he’d found some fine gold, but not a lot. I too had sample panned from this big hole the various layers over the years and didn’t find much and recommended we break camp, move upstream to the gulch, and so we did. Diggin in the gulch is MUCH easier vs. busting that compacted layering with a pick & shovel.
On my last trip back from the county dump I stopped by the one pawnshop in BV and purchased a nearly brand new Keene A-52 sluice for Dave, having seen it there several days before when I bought a used ladder to work on my house. Dave gave me the money, and $85 + tax wasn’t bad for it, especially since Dave was using a heavy, 2-piece unit more homemade than not. So, he walked back up to my truck, had lunch, and brought it back down, ready to really get some gold. In minutes, we had it set up and we both were carrying buckets of material and sluicing from the gulch, only this time we were digging from bedrock in a dry plunge pool upstream from the elbow bend.
We pitched rocks, screened out magnetite & carried material as fast as we could to get max material moved before going home for the day. Amazing just how much magnetite was in that dry gulch material! I used my Heavy Hitter sluice magnet & rare earth magnet in my classifier screen, and shoveled the material over it. Check out this video here, one of the 10 I made on the trip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QYVr3gtsGk
For those concerned I may be losing gold in the magnetite I stripped off my magnets, I sample panned out several big pans of this extracted magnetite just to be sure I wasn’t losing any good gold. I never found more than a speck or two, so I know my method was safe, allowing me to keep my riffle bars in my Wolf Trap sluice MUCH cleaner, and hopefully catching more gold in the box.
Diggin along, I hit a pocket holding a lot of black magnetite & two old rusty square nails on the bedrock, so I know I was in a good potential holding point for gold too. Whenever I find rusty nails I generally find some gold too. I years past I found more nails at the stream end of the gulch.
By 5:30PM or so it was time to do a final clean up, pan out our cons and head back to the house for dinner and some celebratory Scotch & cigars and admire the sunset on the 14ers to the West. Driving out of the Granite Cemetery on FR 398D to join FR 398 back to Hwy 24, I saw a big white Dodge truck coming down the road, most likely from the “placering area” out the power line road at the Southwest end of the BLM Cache Creek property. They passed slowly by & then waived me over. As I stopped & rolled down my window the driver asked, “are you Randy?”. I was shocked.........said “yes”. They said they were Chad & Will from Oklahoma, had been prospecting Cache Creek these past few days & were driving back to Oklahoma. Well.....show me the gold I said. So, they did, and was it ever some nice fine Colorado gold in their snuffer bottle! I was amazed........had to have been several grams, plus several pickers too in another vial from the days before.
VERY nice going you guys! Dave & I decided there then to come back up Sunday morning and head to the placering area, meet Larry the GPOC Camp Host & try to get into the “Big Hole” as it was called and dig some clay layer for ourselves. After some B.S. time, we all drove out South on Hwy 24 and Dave & I returned to BV to do dinner and the evening ritual of Scotch & a cigar for me. Chad & Will here shooting for maybe Durango and spend the night on their way back to Oklahoma.Day 6: Sunday 3 July – Dave I & headed up to the Cache Creek placering area in the morning and arrived about 9 AM. Dave had to head back to C. Springs about noonish, so we had maybe 3 to 3 ½ hrs to try and get our fair share of fine Colorado gold. Arriving the area, Larry the GPOC Camp Host greeted us and we chatted about the “Big Hole” where Chad & Will had been working in on Saturday. He informed us we were too late, as it was already occupied by several groups, but he lead us to another hole not being used, and gave us some pointers on the layers to dig in.
So, Dave & I set up our sluices on the feeder creek close by and commenced to digging dirt and sluicing. Right next to us was a young man, named John, out of Ft. Collins I believe, sluicing dirt in his Tee Dee E-Z mini-sluice. He was mixing his dirt with water to help dissolve the clay balls & make a slurry that he was feeding into his sluice. We chatted a bit & I realized he’d seen some of my previous Cache Creek videos on YouTube and recognized me from them. How cool is that? By noon I ‘d dug about 8 or 9 total pails of dirt, did several cleanups and found only a little find gold. A bit of a bummer after seeing what Chad & Will had extracted the day before from the “Big Hole”. Dave was digging from different clay & sand/gravel layers in the bank where the old timers had sluiced thru during their hydraulicing operations.
As the morning progressed, Dave was sluicing away using his new Keene A-52 and John was showing us both up in a big way with a lot of good color & flakes in his little Tee-Dee sluice. John brought me a cold local brew beer from Ft. Collins from his cooler and I drowned my sorrows in a great cold micro-brew beer. Thanks John!
By 1PM it was time to get Dave back on the road to C. Springs, so we packed out of Cache Creek, and said our goodbyes to John and wished him all the luck in the world. Dave packed up and headed home, stopping at a new BBQ joint in BV and I had lunch at the house and took a quick nap before getting up 4PM and then working on the house until dark.
Day 7: Monday 4 July – Hope everyone had a safe & happy 4th of July! I worked on my house all day. Only saw a few fireworks going off in BV that evening, as there was an extremely high fire danger from open fires & fireworks, and most folks kept it quiet & low profile.
Day 8: Tuesday 5 July – Last full day before flying home. Worked on the house until 10:30AM, completing all the little projects on my list & planting 6 Aspen trees in the back patio area, as I had wanted to do. So, now.....off to do some fly-fishing on Cottonwood Creek, up above Spring Canyon Resort, on the way to Cottonwood Lake on FR 344. Arriving about 11AM I was rod strung, suited up and wading the creek in search of Brown Trout. Man oh man was the water running HIGH & FAST! Hardly a place to ford the creek w/o fear of getting washed down with just one errant foot placement. The best spot to cast my bead head nymphs were in the slow eddies along the bank, and in the first hour had at least 10 – 15 nice Browns on my line, the smallest 4 inches and largest about 11 inches. I waded out to a huge logjam and fished both sides, catching several Browns, but snagged my flies on an underwater branch in fast water. Had no choice but to pull it loose....”SNAP” went the line and I lost it all.....both nymphs and my strike indicator. Bummer... As I was tying on a black ant trailer below my bead head prince nymph I dropped the ant into the water. As it swirled below me in an eddy I quickly reached over to see if I could grab it before it washed downstream, and as I did my glasses fell out of my open zipper pocket on my vest and were instantly washed downstream.
DANG IT! What an idiot...1/2 blind, in the middle of the creek and no glasses. So now the fun turned into a survival situation in an instant. O.K. Tie off the rod, zip all my pockets, break a really strong stick off the log jam for a balance rod and wade across the raging creek to get to the roadside. Safely across, a long walk back to the truck and my spare set of glasses. Good to have a spare set with me! Boy Scout training paid off – “BE PREPARED”, well mostly. O.K., back to creek, and back to fishing for Browns. What beauty as the thunderstorms build up over Mt. Princeton and all became dark & windy, the rainy & then hail & lightning all around. Time to bug out! So, in several hours on the creek, a lost about 5 flies, a pair of glasses & caught/released maybe 2 dozen Brown Trout. As the torrential rains fell I headed down to BV and that new BBQ joint across from K’s Dairy Delite. I ordered up a full rack of BBQ pork ribs & they were superb! BV always needed a good BBQ joint and Porgy’s is now the place. So, with half a day, my last day in BV left and the thunderstorms raging now up/down the valley....and Chalk Creek & the Arkansas River both WAY to high to fish well.....what to do? Drive back to Cache Creek & prospect for at least a few hours before calling it a day! So, up to Cache Creek I drive, arriving about 3 PM and as I get my Wolf Trap sluice set up I see the creek is even higher than before due to the snow melt.
The sky is threatening, and there is one massive thunderstorm building over Mt. Elbert to the North, rocking & rolling, and pretty dark & cloudy overhead, but no rain on me, well...not yet, I commence to prospecting for my last Colorado gold of the adventure...
I got back to the dry plunge pool I was digging in several days before and really work the bedrock hard, scraping & brushing it with my stiff hand brushes and picks. My Keene crevice tool was key to really breaking up the conglomerated gravels right on the bedrock and my sluice & rare earth magnets really helped pull out the magnetite. I knew when I was in good, prospective material when I found pockets of heavy black magnetite in/around the bedrock.
I only got 6 pails dug & sluiced before the weather took a real turn for the worse and the thunderstorm building above me from the uplift from Quail Mountain started to rain & lightening. So, I quickly washed out my sluice into my pail, packed up and headed up the hill to the truck as fast I could in the thin mountain air. As I loaded up the truck the skies opened up, and I drove out of there with a ziplock bag of cons to pan out back home & a lot of fond memories, pictures & videos of gold prospecting on Cache Creek in June/July 2011.
Day 9: Wednesday 6 July – Travel day home -- packed up early, got coffee at the 7-Eleven and headed to Denver IAP for my flight to Atlanta. Man, I sure hated to go..........the 43-degree lows, the 92-degree highs on several days, normally 85ish highs, the low, low humidity, no biting bugs to annoy you, the million dollar views in all directions....that’s my kind of High Colorado adventure! Was able to fly standby out of Denver and get home at 8PM instead of 1 AM on Thursday.
Now I am catching up with laundry, yard, bills, e-mails and such having been gone 9 days... I look back at all the work I did on my house and all the fun I had prospecting with others on Cache Creek & I sure count myself blessed, and I lost 6 pounds too!
What’s that? Did someone say, “Show me the gold!”. O.K. Here’s my take from sluicing during the trip, except for what I gave away...........2 rusty old square nails & some fine Cache Creek gold:
Hope you enjoyed my very lengthy Trip Report here, the embedded pictures and the check out my 10 short videos I posted on YouTube of my 2011 Colorado Gold Adventure....search on “Cache Creek, Colorado” or look me up under “C-17A” on YouTube or simply go to my first video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kg04ETvgg0
I hope you get out there and have your own “gold adventure” soon and plz stop by my Gold Adventures Forum and post a Trip Report there too for all to enjoy!
God bless & heavy pans,
Randy “C-17A” www.goldadventures.biz
