Ok, I admit it. I've got the fever. My kids go about the house singing the song from "Paint Your Wagon", "Gooold fever! No rockin' rollin' girl and fellow stuff can cure the gooold fever...". My wife even gets into the act. She modified the words to a children's song and sang "I'm so glad when Daddy comes home, as glad as glad can be, He brings black sand and his gold pan and pans some gold for me...".
I've tried most of the streams in the canyons nearby where I live, and although some of them have yielded gold before, I didn't find any. When I returned home from one of my fruitless trips, my oldest daughter Elise and her children were visiting. The three year old, Karin, asked me, "Grandpa, did you see any leprechauns today?". "Leprechauns?", I pondered silently. "What the Sam Hill do leprechauns have to do with anything?"
I'm thick, but I'm not concrete. I finally got it. "No, I didn't," I told her, "but I'll keep an eye out for one from now on."
On father's day, the wife and kids got me a Garrett "Gold Stinger" metal detector, which I'd been dreaming about. I scanned the yard with it and found a .55 caliber bullet and several coins, including a silver dime. The bullet was an old black powder type, and had been fired. It probably came in with the top soil when we put in the lawn.
The guys at work started to get the bug. I dumped a bunch of catalogs on them that I'd picked up from various dealers in the area. It was surprising how many people had an interest, but had never followed it up.
John Urses at "Chuck's Detectors and Prospector Supplies" suggested I try in the Tibble Fork area north of American Fork canyon. While planning the trip, I asked my friend Bob Hutchings if he had a gold pan. He said, "Yes, I've had one for twenty years, but it's never even been wet." Marty Overdiek confessed sheepishly, "I've got two of them."
On the appointed day I got Bob out of bed, and we took off with hopes of high adventure. Poor Marty had to work. Bob had worked on the road to Tibble Fork many years before, and remembered the way, sort of. Although the road turned to dirt and was narrow and rough, we made it all the way in my family sedan.
We weren't the only loonies out there looking. On the way, we saw a guy walking along the road with a piece of coarse screen in his hand. I stopped and asked "Are you finding anything?" He looked at us as if to say "How do you know what I'm doing?" At last he said, "Not yet. Are you guys familiar with this area? Where is Dutchman's Flat from here?" We didn't know any more than he did, so I wished him luck and went on. Later at the old mine, we met another guy with his family who was getting ready to try his luck with a sluice box.
The beauty of the Mineral Basin area is undiscovered by most of us. It doesn't show up on any road map I've looked at, you need a forest service or BLM map to find it. The old mine dumps and the crumbling walls of the processing plant had an antique charm. A stream flowed out of a small hole in the canyon wall, which may have once been the entrance to a mine. There was a brilliant orange algae growing in it. The green trees, the white humps of the mine dumps, the orange stream... Van Gogh would have gone sane trying to portray it all.
Bob found an old star drill half buried in the white tailings, and took it home to go with the old mine car which adorns a corner of his backyard. He bought it from the widow of a man who had plans to ship loads of old mining equipment to Peru, but died before he could put his plan to completion.
The view of Mount Timpanogas as seen from the North put the Alps to shame. I cursed myself for not bringing my camera.
While panning the stream I found the remains of a few rodents, but there was nothing left but bones. These had been scrubbed surgically clean by insect scavengers and bleached by the sun until they were as white as Grandma's sheets. Mother Nature keeps a clean house.
On the way out we came upon still another guy who was parked in the middle of the road, lost in the wilderness of his thoughts, examining the contents of a snuffer bottle. He was oblivious to us and the two other cars behind us who all wanted to get by. Maybe he'd found the big strike we were looking for, I don't know. We finally had to go up on the shoulder to get by.
We hadn't found any gold, but had fun just the same. I understand there are restrictions there now, so check with the Forest Service if you want to go there.
On our wedding anniversary, my wife gave me a sluice box. I gave her a Garrett gold panning kit... with a new set of wedding rings in the pan. "Here's a little gold for you", I told her. She was speechless.
We planned our vacation with gold in mind, and the GPAA claims guide was used to pick our route. My wife has a sister living in Boise, Idaho and the Potato Head claim isn't too far away. Matching town names with an Idaho map showed that the Bear Rock and Rusty#1/Graylock#2 claims weren't far away from Potato Head.
We borrowed my father-in-law's motorhome (thank goodness for relatives with resources) and took off to seek our fortune. I had hopes of looking around my grandfather's old homestead on the Utah-Idaho border, but we couldn't find it.
We stopped at a truck stop in Twin Falls to buy two boxes of "Roadkill Helper" for the neighbors at their request, and then set sail for Dog Creek campground. It was after dark when we finally got there.
I got up early the next morning and nosed around to see what the country was like. I found the stump of a tree that had been knocked down, and examined the roots for sign. There was a lot of glitter, but I've been foxed before. I suspected it was mica, and so it turned out to be.
Later I packed all my stuff down to the stream, and proceeded to run gravel through the sluice box until lunch. I panned my concentrates down to black sand, and decided to call a halt for lunch and a possible rain storm. During the rest of our trip, I simply panned everything down to black sand, and saved the concentrates in an ice cream bucket.
The next day we went up to Rocky Bar, a true ghost town. On the way, we found there were some hot springs that ran into the river just above our camp. Somebody had built small dams out of stones, and I longed to soak in the resulting hot tubs, but the gold was calling, you know how it is.
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Hey, you! (Click). My wife caught me in the stream.
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We wandered around the old ghost town looking for coins with the metal detector, but I hadn't learned what coins sounded like yet, and all I found were nails and bottle caps. We worked in the stream below Rocky Bar, and I was digging in a deep hole full of gravel when I found my first gold, or rather someone else's... It was still in the bottle that some other prospector had put it in before he lost it in the stream. There were a couple of pinhead sized nuggets and a few small flakes. Would you mind filling up the bottle next time? Thanks.
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Nope, just another old bottle cap.
| Old cabins still stand. |
Maybe one of you recognizes this story. Sorry, but finders keepers.
I had prayed that I would find some gold, and my wife's comment was "Pretty good. Not only does He answer your prayers, but gift wraps it as well."
The country itself is the treasure to be found. It's beautiful beyond my ability to describe. The road is paved all the way to Featherville, and the dirt road from there to Rocky Bar was just fine, no problems even for a motorhome.
When I got back to work I was surprised that nobody knew about Pine, Featherville, or Rocky Bar, including several people who were born and raised in Idaho. My boss said his grandfather had been born in Rocky Bar, but he had no idea where it was.
The next day we went to Boise to spend an evening with the wife's sister, Connie Post, and her family. Connie and her husband Joe showed me their metal detector, a White "Coinmaster 5000". It was over ten years old, and had never been out of the box. I put it together for them, and was amazed to find the ni-cad batteries were still good. I told Joe, "You must live right."
The next day we tried to go to Silver City, but four or five miles of dust like whole wheat flour sifting into the motorhome called a halt to that. I think I'm going to need a good 4x4 pickup if I'm going to some of the places I'd like to explore. Know anybody who would like to trade for a red turbo-charged sports car?
We backtracked to Boise and made arrangements to meet Connie and her kids in Idaho City for a day of adventure. Joe had to work, poor devil. Lets his vocation interfere with his avocation.
The road to Idaho City was paved all the way. Idaho City is listed as a ghost town, but it's still very lively. We wandered around town looking at all the sights, had lunch, bought a few trinkets, including a little vial with some gold dust in it, and headed for the creek.
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Totem poles at the visitor's center.
| Looking down Main street. |
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| Main street businesses. |
The campsite was on some old dredge tailings, and after I showed Connie how to operate their metal detector, she became a metal detecting fool. While we showed the kids how to pan for gold and they played in the stream, she proceeded to dig up the camp from end to end and side to side. She brought back a big spike, lots of empty shell cases, three toy cars, some bullets, and assorted bits of rusty iron. Every find rated as a treasure. She kept saying, "I've got to go home and read the book on how to work this thing."
They didn't head home until the sun was going down, and didn't want to leave even then. The next day we headed up the road to Stanley. My dad surveyed the route for that road during the 30's while in the CCC camp, and for that reason if no other, I wanted to go over it.
Dad did a good job, assuming that the road still follows the path he laid out. I remember him telling about the afternoon he spent in a large pine tree because a bull elk took exception to him being there. The guy running the bulldozer finally came by and rescued him.
We had hoped to spend a few days by the shore of Red Fish lake, but so did too many others. All the spaces were filled, so we camped in well named 'Sunny Gulch' campground nearby, and I tried my luck in the stream, but didn't see any sign.
The next day we left for Sun Valley, and I tried the Salmon river on the way. After my metal detector insisted there was something in the stream, I dug and dug and ran the gravel through the sluice box, and after working an hour or so, I succeeded in liberating a large washer, probably used in construction of the bridge I was by.
That night we camped by the side of the Big Wood river, and I went down to the stream again. The water was swift in places, and the rocks had lots of cracks where gold could lodge. I dug the gravel as my detector indicated, but all I found was black sand, a fish hook and a sinker.
Finally the detector indicated something more than usual, and I panned several loads of gravel trying to get whatever it was, without success. The detector continued to show something, and finally I just dug and waved the detector over the spot and then dug some more until it showed I had dug up whatever it was. I then panned the last load of gravel to recover it.
At first the object looked like an old rusty washer, but closer examination showed it was an old buffalo nickel, minted 1936. All the nickel is gone, and it's thinner than a new nickel by quite a bit, but the face and date can be clearly seen. In its condition it may not be worth much, but finding it was still a thrill.
When we finally got home, I started panning the black sand that I had faithfully collected every place I'd been, but I had so much of it that it was overwhelming. I got out my 'poop tube' sluice box, and ran the black sand through it. I then sucked up the sand that was clinging to the first six or seven riffles and dumped it into a pan and panned it.
I gently swirled the water over it and shook the pan gently to cause the sand to fan out into a thin layer until suddenly, like the dropping of Salome's last veil, the black sand fell away and the first gold I ever found (not counting the stuff in the bottle) was revealed, gleaming like a beacon in the night. At last things were going as I had always expected them to. It was reassuring to me to know that a poop tube really works and my panning technique was good.
I ran the black sand through the poop tube several times, but I got all the gold I could see on the first pass. I wish I'd done this at the end of each day. Now I don't know where the gold came from.
It was only a few dollars worth, but what a thrill it gave. If there were lots of gold out where we had been, the big boys with the deep pockets would have it all sewed up as tight as a bull in high fly season.
I was talking to Jeremy Martin, a fellow prospector at work, and told him that I had never found any gold using my sluice box. He said "I ran into an old boy who had been doing this for twenty years, and he said what you have to do is classify the material into a bucket, check the classifier for nuggets, chuck the rocks, and then classify the concentrates with a finer screen into a second bucket. Keep doing this until you have it down close to sand. Then you run the sand through the sluice box, using just enough water flow to move the sand. If you just dump the raw material into the sluice, the gold gets washed away with the larger rocks."
It made sense to me. I've seen those different sized classifier screens in shops before, but I didn't know what they were for. I'm going to have to get me a couple, whaddya think? I wonder how much gold I lost this way. I guess I'm still a greenhorn after all.
So I didn't get rich, but I got out of the house so I could escape from the twin thieves of time, television and the home computer.
The reason I didn't find more is because I didn't do my home work. I need to research how to find gold, where to look. Instead I learned how to pan for gold, and how to operate a metal detector and a sluice box. Well, I'm still working on the sluice box. I can spend the winter doing research at the library and the book stores. You have to keep looking, even if you don't find anything. Guess how much gold I've found when I wasn't looking for it. This is for fun, not for profit. Of course, if I find a little profit in my pan, I'm not going to toss it out.
But the best part of my adventures was the look on my granddaughter Karin's face when she came to the house, and I held up the vial of nuggets and dust that I'd found in the stream and said, "Guess what I saw while we were on vacation in Idaho! He was moving too fast for me to catch him, so I didn't get a pot of gold, but he dropped this in the stream while he was trying to get away..."
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