Well I survived the trip out to Kentucky Camp! I'm sore and kind of feeling like I was run over by a train but I survived.
Got out there on Sunday and after unloading my gear, Robi took off back to the homestead. I wandered down to see Fred and Elinor who are the care takers for this month while I waited for Chris to arrive. It's always a pleasure to see Fred and his much better half as they are very nice folks. That Fred also happens to have a case of "Gold Fever" doesn't hurt either.
He managed to sneak away a couple of time to come on down to the wash to play with us.
Chris finally got there about 4 PM and after getting him unloaded, we proceeded to haul the gear down to the wash and get camp set up. For those of you that have never been to this area, let me explain that it's hard to find a good place to set up even a small tent. This is because there are so many "Coyote Holes" in the area that it reminds me of the impact area of the Ft. Hood Artillery range!!! The grass was very tall so it made it even harder to find a couple of good spots that would be close to the work. After some hunting we found a couple of good places and got the tents up and soon were ready to relax for a bit and have some dinner.
Waking up the next morning, we got the sluices set up and started digging. We opted to try some new areas instead of working the bank like we had in the past. This time we hit the bottom of the wash and went straight down till we hit what seemed like bedrock. After running a quick test of three buckets I found some nice pieces of gold and knew that I was in a pretty good area. I started off running 1/2 inch classified material through my re-circ highbanker and was rinsing out the mats after every three buckets. I took the cons and panned them down just enough to make sure I was still on the gold and after grabbing out any pickers, I bagged up the rest to go through them here at the house after I got back.
All in all we managed to process about a yards worth of materials each while on site. This of course required us to actually dig about 2-1/2 to 3 yards due to the amount of rock. A couple of the larger rocks required a team effort to get them out of the way but it was well worth it. Nice course buttery yellow gold was waiting under those big rocks!!! Granted, none of them were like the St. Patrick's Day nugget from earlier this year in size, but they had much more character.
The weather on this trip was varied. Hot during the day and cold at night. Lots of dew over everything each morning but it evaporated quickly once the sun came up. We did have one rain shower that popped up out of nowhere that was enough to drive us to our tents, but it only lasted for a few minutes and it was back to work. (Yet another reason to use a re-circ system out there instead of trying to drywash!)
After checking in with Robi on Wednesday and finding out that she was going to come out and join us, I switched over to the drop riffle sluice since it is much easier for her to run. No mats to worry about etc. This also meant I had to change from 1/2 in to 1/4 in classifying of the materials. This wasn't as bad as it could have been thanks to the extra large classifier that Chris had made up and brought out. In a nutshell it's a large basket out of a freezer that he'd lined with 1/4 in hardware cloth. This thing could handle 4-5 shovels full of raw dirt at a time and after a few rounds you had enough to fill up a coule of buckets in no time. As you shake it, the materials drop into a 20 gallon tub. We tried to keep it to only half full so we didn't tear up the tub to quickly.
I managed to run just under a yard of materials and turn them into "super cons" plus I brought back another dozen buckets to do here. Half of them were from the hole I worked most of the week that was giving up some good stuff and the other six were from an area about 10 yards up stream. I ran a test batch fromthe new place and got the best gold for a single bucket I've ever gotten from that area. So I've got a dozen buckets of materials as well as a big bag of cons to work down before I can give ya'll a final gold tally. Stay tuned folks! The fun is still going on!!!
