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Hokay, this one is another difficult one to give away, as I had hoped to profit from it some day. But, I’ve had to force myself to face reality, and I realize that the chances of me ever dredging in this spot again are pretty much nil. So, with that said………….
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Buried, but not forgotten
It was late August, 1978 and I was dredging on my uppermost claim on the Merced River. There was a deep hole just below where I later found a small crevasse where I recovered a little over three and a half pounds (troy) of gold.
We had been in a three or four year period of drought with very little snow in the higher elevations, and almost no rain. The river was lower than I had ever seen it in the past. As a matter of fact, it was so low, almost everyone was getting ear infections due to the water being so warm and moving so slow. Believe me, “swimmers ear”, (as they say
ain’t nothing nice”. (lol)
Anyway, I went into this deep hole just to check it out, just using my floating air-compressor, and found that my 20 foot air hose lacked about 2 feet of reaching the bedrock. I had started at the up-river end of the hole and crawled along the bedrock which sloped down at about a 20 degree drop. I was just kind of playing around this particular day. Exploring you might say. I managed to pop about 8 or 9 pretty little one pennyweight nuggets out of the cracks that followed the slope down to the bottom.
When I got to the deepest part of the hole, I found a natural “dike” that was about 3 foot high at its’ highest point, and about 8 to 10 inches thick. It extended from the road side of the river, straight across to the opposite side, where it disappeared into the overburden. After studying the contours of the edge of the overburden a bit, I figured that since the hole didn’t hold any rocks or gravel, that any gold passing through during flooding would probably follow the side where the overburden tapered down to the clean bedrock.
So, the following morning, I returned with some tools and a piece of angle iron. I found a crack, well above the water and drove the angle iron vertically down into the crack. Then after I was sure that it wouldn’t become dislodged during usage, I tied a 3/8s rope to it and then, using the rope, I climbed down the almost vertical side of rock, until I was in the river. I then took the free end of the rope, swam across, and found a sturdy tree trunk to tie it to.
After everything was prepared, I had to go back upriver about 50 yards or so and float my dredge down to where I planned to dredge. I tied the bowline of the dredge to the rope that was stretched across the river, then because the water was moving so slowly, I had to put another rope on the discharge end of the dredge and tie it to a boulder about 30 feet down-river. Other wise, the force of the tailings coming out of the sluice box would shove the dredge up-river into where I was dredging.
I dredged a hole about 6 feet in diameter, and bout 4 feet deep and found mostly fine gold. Then the overburden started becoming more compacted and I started seeing an occasional small nugget. But, so far, nothing like I had expected. By the time I was ready to quit for the day, I had expanded the hole to about 10ft in diameter and about 6 feet deep. While I was cleaning the sluice box, I noticed somebody climbing down the bank from the road. I quickly panned the concentrates and found I only had about a quarter oz. of gold. After all the work I had put in, that sure didn’t get me too excited. (lol)
After making sure that everything was secured for the evening, I picked up the gold pan (with the gold still in it,) and waded back across the river. As I got closer to the other side, I recognized the man who had come down to the rivers edge to greet me. I had let him and his dad dredge on my claims about 2 years before. (I never charged anything, I just asked them to let me know if they found anything worthwhile, so I could figure out the travel of the gold.)
After we got re-acquainted, I asked if he and his dad had been doing any dredging. Sadly, I found out that his dad, who flew a crop-duster during the planting/growing season, had hit a power line and had died in the resulting crash about a year earlier.
He told me that he had been coming to the river periodically since then, hoping to find me there so that he could keep their promise to let me know where they had found a nice deposit of gold.
And, I’ll tell you where that was, in my next post. (lol)
would you believe that one night, during a full moon, when I was much younger (and dumber,) just as I started down that road, I lost my headlights and came all the way down with-out them
Like I said, "much dumber.) 
![:-\](https://www.treasurenet.com/smilies/undecided.gif "Undecided :-\")
