I look back and remember "how it was" growing up there in those time. My sister visited the "old neighborhood" about 4-5 years after we left, and even by then, the area had built up so much as to be nearly unrecognizable. The house we had lived in for 10 years had burned down, and the owner sold the 2 acres of land (for 5X what he paid us for) for developers to put up 4 condos with swimming pools.
The last couple years I lived there, I spent nearly all my spare time on the river near my house. There was not much gold to be found in my area - but enough to keep me interested, and over time, it did accumulate, and I had maybe 2 ounces of fine dust and a few tiny pickers until "that summer of '72".... My father and I loved to ride trail bikes on the trails and old mining and logging roads in the Sierras, and during the summers would take the whole family (and the neighbors) camping about once a month or so in the foothills NE of Auburn - Yankee Jims's, Mumford Bar, Iowa Hill, Forest Hill. I had made a rocker box as a school History project, and dad challenged me to "see if it was any good" on one trip. The winter had been rather mild that year, and not a heavy snow in the mountains, so the North Fork of the American River was running pretty low, and one area had a lot of bedrock exposed, including a crack about two feet wide running across the riverbed, just below a sharp bend. I set up my rocker box on the bank, and proceeded to digging out the crevice...and in two hours managed to get out about 5 ounces of good nuggets and pickers, ranging in size from peanuts to rice grains. That was my "glory hole". I worked the rest of the crevice, as deep as I could reach down, and managed to get 3-4 ounces over the next day or so. Altogether, I think my total take on that weekend was just under 10 ozt, including the cons I took home to pan out later. It was 1972, so I got about $300 for my haul that camping trip. Dad was nearly paranoid about me having so much gold, since it was still a Federal crime to "hoard" it, so he made sure I sold everything I recovered. I did keep a couple of nuggets, just for keepsakes, a 1.2 ozt and .75 ozt. That was the last camping trip we went on in California; six months after that summer, I was living in Kansas...not a real "hot spot" for precious metals...I just wish now I kept ALL of it.
