CLEANING UP

This is a picture that you will never see - me getting up at 5:30 a.m. full of excitement - to vacuum! Yet, I spent some of last summer and almost all of this past winter, doing just that. It wasn't "dust bunnies" I was after, however, it was gold!

A few Decembers ago, I wrote a Christmas dry-washing article about the Mojave Desert. I said that I had made a portable Vac to clean off the caliche (cement-like material) shelves that one encounters out there. But it wasn't until last summer on the Klamath River near Happy Camp, California, that I actually used the Vac for what most people use them for crevicing. I knew about crevicing, of course, but it just wasn't my thing. In fact, on several of my surface mining (motorized sluicing) trips there would be lots of prospectors around the creeks crevicing and getting gold. I can't recall, though, at that time seeing anyone with a Vac. They all had store-bought or homemade tools to get the gold out of all the nooks and crannies. On the Klamath I borrowed a Mack-Vack made by Pro-Mack in Happy Camp, because I hadn't the space to bring my motorized sluice along. My little portable Vac that I'd made was in the "equipment graveyard." I'd brought gad bars and digging tools, so I was set up to crevice. I'll admit that I wasn't very enthusiastic about it at the time. I like to see dirt flying and lots of material running through my equipment. But it didn't take long to change that lack of enthusiasm!

The bedrock around the area where I was on the Klamath broke apart fairly easily. I walked around trying to find hard-packed gravel between the seams of these massive slabs. I'd only used the Vac for a while and had only about one-half of the 5-gallon bucket it was attached to, filled (not much material, I thought). Yet when I panned it out, there was a beautiful match head-sized nugget. Now, this type of prospecting wasn't bad at all! Kay Tabbert and her husband Chuck, both members of The New 49'ers, were in the same area at the time. Chuck was busy surface dredging while Kay, with only her little hand tools, a whisk broom and dustpan, was separating bedrock downriver from me. All of a sudden I heard Kay calling for Chuck (and anyone else around). So I walked over to see what was going on. I couldn't believe it. Kay had separated a rock about the size of a melon, and in the crevice, stuck to one side, were 7 flakes of gold! Just like that! I couldn't get back to my area fast enough.

I had dredged for years and I knew just what to spot the places where the water would deposit gold. It was really no different - I just didn't have to get my hair wet! I was feeling a little impatient, though, as I never did wait to fill up an entire 5-gallon bucket. But what I did pan produced great little "clinkers" of Klamath gold.

Unfortunately, I only had about seven days last summer up on the Klamath. But, I had five months this winter to play in the dirt. Lucky for me, I got "hooked" on vacuuming crevices!

I was prospecting Quartzsite, Arizona and surrounding areas. The desert had a lot of rain this past summer and everyone was hoping that the washes would "pay off!" I decided to sell my beloved "Nick's Nugget" dry-washer, as I knew I was going to be out prospecting alone a lot; and, as great as it was, it was too heavy and clumsy for me to handle on my own. I purchased a small dry-washer combo (with the Vac), from my friends Bob and Linda Taylor, who make them each year in Quartzsite. This was great. One engine ran both and I could carry everything in one trip.

Hunting for bedrock in the desert is certainly not like on the rivers. It definitely doesn't expose itself as much-yet in many places it is not deeply hidden. I was finding many places in washes where people had dug down to bedrock and hadn't even touched it with a whisk broom. So, guess what I did? They'd already done the heavy work-I just sat there and cleaned up the gold!

Finding new places to Vac was not easy, as I've said. I've known for years, from experience, that the gold in the deserts isn't always where it's supposed to be. What would look like great bedrock on the rivers often means nothing in the desert, mostly due to the lack of water volume and movement in the deserts. When I arrived at Quartzsite I met up with Al Powell, who is also a New 49'er member I met briefly while on the Klamath. Al and I were finding "perfect" looking bedrock, in established gold areas, that produced nothing. We were always shocked, because all the "recipes" for gold were there. We could have found more gold in downtown Quartzsite! We weren't giving up, however!

I decided to take five days and go off to find a hot spot for Al and me to work. I found a very small ravine below a heavily mined area that had a large section of bedrock exposed. It took two days, pulling "Buick-sized" rocks, to work myself down to where I was getting some nice gold. After the fourth day, I showed Al my gold and took him out to the spot for us to clean it out together. Well, I suppose I did my job too well; as except for some small flecks, Al and I Vac'd all day and got nothing large - "OOPS! Sorry, Al!"

The weather in the desert turned nasty, with off and on heavy rains that went on for days. The dry-washers around the desert were silenced. The ground in places was damp as deep as eight inches down, which forced people to grab their gold detectors and head out nugget-shooting until things dried out. Yet Al and I weren't held back-we were still out there, in a new area, with our Vacs. We didn't have any trouble bringing up the damp gravel, although the two of us looked like "mud pies" at the end of the day.

I had, from the beginning, been running my Vac materials through my dry-washer so I wouldn't have to pan as much concentrate. Even the damp material didn't present much of a problem, as Al and I just ran everything through the dry-washer two or three times. I'm sure that the people driving by during those wet days who saw the dry-washer running, said to themselves, "They are crazy!" Well-that's a whole other story, but we did have our pretty desert gold to look at all the way back to our desert "sanitarium!" I would recommend purchasing a Vac to anyone, even as a backup to your usual motorized sluice or dry-washer. And, now, when "housework" day comes each week I won't dread using the vacuum-I'll just be practicing! Good Luck!