By Marcie Stumpf

It was March, but it certainly didn’t look like spring in Happy Camp. Snow was falling, and it was thick and heavy–but it was warm enough so that it wasn’t sticking very well. But, because it was still cold and damp, we were all standing around the large wood stove warming up.

We were watching Gordon Zahara as he paced back and forth, back and forth, while he told us about the find that he and Lars Larson had made detecting several days before. His pacing was due to his excitement, and the restlessness caused by the weather outside, which was preventing him from being out with his detector.

In late January of this year, when poor weather prevented Lars Larson from mining by his usual methods, Lars bought a Minelab GT16000 detector. He wanted to get right out with it and do some detecting. The problem with that was that there were very few people in Happy Camp during the winter who had time to go out detecting, and Lars wasn’t sure where to go.

The area around Happy Camp is not well-known as a good detecting area. Most of the people who come here come to dredge or high bank, sluice or pan. The very heavy mineralization of the soil in this area prevented most people from finding any nuggets, until two years ago. At that time, several people who were very good with detectors used the Minelab GT16000 and the Fisher Gold Bug with good results. Interest has been growing ever since then. There are some quite rich old hydraulic areas that have yielded some good nuggets during the summers, but no one had done any hunting in the winter.

Before commitments took him away from detecting for awhile, Gordon spent some time on the creek claims last summer, and found several nuggets in high bedrock crevices. That really enthused him about the possibilities for detecting in this area. All the creeks in the area are known for their nice nuggets. There are also all the hydraulic tailings on the river, to say nothing of the high bedrock areas of the river to check out!

His return from a two-month trip coincided with Lars’ purchase of his new detector. The two wasted no time in teaming up. Gordon has a Garrett Groundhog that he has had quite a while, and uses a Depthmaster for enhancement. He knows his detector so well, and has such good results, that he is reluctant to change.

Lars, who is new to detecting, was enthused to have someone who was experienced to give him some tips. Unfortunately, the weather turned really rotten, and for two weeks there were never less than six inches of snow on the ground, so the two of them turned to other things, trying to accomplish as much as possible. This would allow them to have more time for detecting as soon as the weather cooperated.

Eventually it did, and we had a week of beautiful weather. By this time, Gordon had so many ideas that he wanted to try that he and Lars did not know where to begin. However, since Lars was new, they tried some of the areas that had produced nuggets in the past, and turned up a few.

The second area they worked was the one that first started producing nuggets two years ago, and has been worked heavily during the last two summers. To enhance their chances, they took along a special rake developed for nugget hunting several years ago. It allows you to go over an area that has good response, working very close to the soil. It has a deep flat edge so that once you’ve gone over it, the surface rocks can easily be removed with minimum disturbance of the soil. After covering the area closely, and removing the targets, the other side is used, which has wide, rounded teeth for removing the top two inches of soil. A large point on one end removes more deeply embedded stones. A flip of the rake to your flat edge again will smooth out the soil, and, “voila,” you essentially have new ground to work. Experienced guys can find nuggets weighing about two tenths of a grain, and you don’t detect those very deep!

Well, they made all their arrangements, and the first nice day they packed a lunch, told everyone not to expect them until late, and headed for their target area with their equipment.

It was a beautiful day—deep blue sky with a few puffy clouds, bright sun, and just a few small patches of snow here and there. You have to experience the air here to believe how sweet it smells, and all this just added to their happiness at finally getting out to detect.

They started out using their rakes, to see if this technique would yield up more treasures; and sure enough, Gordon found a nugget right off. Lars was detecting in an area nearby, but after Gordon hit the third nugget just a few minutes apart, he accepted Gordon’s offer to work the same area.

The day passed very quickly as they continued to work the same area over and over, using the raking technique. They were amazed when the light started to fail, because they were still in the same spot. They had worked all day in an area no larger than 3 feet by 10 feet, and they were still getting good responses at day’s end. Their take for the day totaled 27 nuggets, the largest of which weighed over 6 pennyweights.

They went back to the area for three more days, before the snow hit once again. All in all, they had a total of 44 nuggets, with a total weight of over 25 pennyweights, all from that little tabletop area—and with the help of their rakes. They each had one nugget that weighed over six pennyweights, and they were beautiful.

This happened just a couple of weeks ago, as I write this; and the two of them are still out there looking every chance they get. They aren’t in the same area, of course. They haven’t hit another spot as good as that one, but they are having success. An opportunity to get in on the beginning of something that could be very good does not come along very often, and they want to take full advantage of it.

This is such a new area for nugget hunting that there are many possibilities. Their enthusiasm is boundless, and Happy Camp, which has seen several “Gold Rushes,” just may be in for another one. This time, however, for metal detecting nuggets.

 

by Marcie Stumpf/Foley

As I rolled over, cold air rushed down my back, and I inched closer to my (ex-) husband, Bill, to get some warmth…Ouch! A sharp rock made contact with my hipbone and brought me wide awake. I didn’t move much, just enough to try to see what time it was by my watch. It was early yet, and unless I wanted to bundle up and build a campfire it was best to stay right where I was.

Once I was warm again, however, I ventured out of the sleeping bag far enough to look out the window of our tent…Yes, he was there again. Each morning, if I awoke early enough, I could watch the great blue heron who inhabited our mining claim. In the early morning hours he stood just a few feet from our tent, surveying his world. He could be seen during the day flying up and down the creek, but this was the only time to see him “up close and personal.” The cold soon drove me back to my covers, and as I lay there I wondered, not for the first time, how I managed to get myself where I was.

It had long been a dream for Bill and our son David to own our own claim. Through diligent research the previous year, they and a friend had managed to locate this one. When they told me about it the first time, I had a sinking feeling that this wasn’t going to be all fun and games. In the first place, it was remote (but they said we could drive all the way in), we would have to tent camp, since we could not drive the camper in, and, although it was only about 35 miles from the campground we were staying in at the time, it took three hours to drive that 35 miles (that was a real bad sign).

I didn’t see the claim at all that first year. It was late by the time we finished all the paperwork on it, and they told me it was no place to get caught in the rains. They did enough testing to know it was worth the price, and we settled for making plans for the next year. Although several friends would be partners, none of them would be able to work it during the first year, so we made plans for just the three of us. We were going to take both our 4-inch and our 5-inch dredge, since we weren’t sure which would work out best.

Spring finally arrived, and, as ready as we could be, we were off. I was beginning to catch the excitement that Bill and David were showing, but I still had a few butterflies concerning the road. I’d thought, after traveling Hwy. 49 through the Mother Lode area for several years, and the back roads, that I was cured of being intimidated by mining area roads. Both of them had been noticeably silent about the road in to the claim, however, which led me to believe it was not going to be something I was going to enjoy. The first hour of our trip in, we wound up, over and around several mountains, on a narrow paved highway. We left that for a dirt road (one lane) and I was given instructions to watch for oncoming vehicles. It was hard to see very far ahead, but I was watching carefully when we rounded a curve and my heart leapt into my throat–we were on top of the world, it seemed! As far as the eye could see in any direction there were forested mountains, all of them below us, except for one taller one right in front of us across what looked like a bottomless chasm.

As Bill slowly rounded the curve, he soothed me by saying that he’d been over it several times, and there was no problem with the road. As I looked across to the opposite mountain I could see a much higher, narrow, steep road hugging the edge of it. I consoled myself by thinking that at least I was not on THAT road. We crept down the side of the mountain, with nothing between us and the edge. Several times it was so narrow that pebbles rolled down, and down, and down….

When we finally reached the bottom it was to find a bridge which we crossed and started up the other side. As I held on to the hand grip and tried to keep my head from hitting the door as we bounced and jumped over the large rocks, ruts and washboard of the narrow road I gritted my teeth–it was now clear that we were on the road I had seen from the other side! (Lucky Me!)

Bill tried to keep up a chatter at first, but gave it up, since keeping the truck on the road with its full load was like handling a bucking bronco, and I did not trust myself to speak. There were still no trees on the edge, and that was on my side of the truck, of course. I wondered at one point if anyone ever did completely bounce right off the road, because we seemed in imminent danger of doing so. I became ill as each curve put us higher and higher above everything.

Finally reaching the top, we pulled off into a meadow to take a break, and I sat on a log waiting for everything to settle back into place inside. The next few miles were breathtaking. Beautiful high meadows full of ferns and many wildflowers, the road banks of deep red earth covered with vines and flowers, and a sky of such a brilliant blue it almost hurt. The air was wonderfully fresh and clean, full of the scent of forest and flowers. Meadows alternated with thick forests of huge pine and cedar laced with little babbling brooks.

We soon turned onto a non-maintained road and pulled over to lock the wheels of both vehicles into four wheel drive. About one fourth of a mile further we turned off again, went over a rise, and then…down. Down a steep hillside through new growth trees so close they continually scraped the truck. We had to scramble to close the windows as they thrust themselves inside. As he tried to straddle a rut that was growing ever wider and was more than 15 inches deep, Bill started to say something…Ooops! The truck fell into the rut avoiding a tree trunk, and we had to work our way back out. Then we had to stop several times to move large boulders that had fallen. Soon we arrived at a sharp switchback, and I had to get out and guide to back them both around.

Until I returned to the truck I didn’t notice the road. As I buckled up we started down and I caught my breath as the truck went over the edge. It was so steep it was like that long first hill you go down on a roller coaster, only this was very narrow and had large fallen logs here and there. We crept down in low four wheel drive, tilting first this way and then that as we drove up on the bank, in and through deep ruts, on or over logs–anything to stay on the narrow road. Then another steep switchback. No where to turn around, so we took it as wide as we could, and just barely made it. Then down another roller coaster ride, and another one.

The trees were so thick I still had no idea how far we had to go, but I was feeling so ill that I knew I couldn’t go much further. I was very relieved when we pulled up and stopped for a break at the bottom of the fourth one. I was looking ahead. I could just catch a glimpse of the creek below through the trees. As I started to get out, however, my foot met nothing but air! I looked down to see the turn in the road badly chewed up with big hunks of shale churned from vehicles trying to claw their way out. It had been torn up so badly that there was at least a 10-foot drop during the turn! Then the road tilted alarmingly where the hillside had slid–tilted so badly that I decided then and there that I was going to walk the rest of the way.

I never did ride up to that point, or beyond there going down. It was a walk of a mile or so from the campsite, but much better than riding. It seemed that last mile was just more than my stomach or nerves could handle.

When I reached the bottom I found a wide, wide wash. Probably 300 feet wide, with groves of trees near the edges, sand and gravel bars, and a crystal clear creek meandering through on the near side. Our campsite was to be just in front of the sheer bedrock face of a mountain that caused the creek to turn west, then south again, where it had worn through the bedrock and made a channel about fifty feet deep in the sheer sides.

Our claim started just above where we were camping, and continued down through the narrow canyon. I did not see the rest of it for a couple of days, as we devoted the first two days to setting up camp. David took the 4-inch dredge down piece by piece in the evenings to where they planned to start dredging.

We were at 4,800 feet elevation, and the nights were cold and wonderful for sleeping, but the days warmed up beautifully. It was the most peaceful, serene place I had ever seen. The area was steeped in mining history, and well documented. I had purchased a book that gave us a lot of information on the area. From that book I knew that our road in to the claim had been built by hand to construct a dam right where we were camped, in order to flume water 11 miles across these rugged mountains to hydraulic another mining area. Just 20 feet downstream from our tent, where the narrow canyon began, the two bottom logs of that dam still remained, the top one just breaking the water.

Our third morning dawned clear and beautiful, and we quickly made preparations to be gone for the day, since Bill and David intended to dredge first at the lower end of the claim. By the time I was ready they had gas cans, pry bars, and all the things they still needed, ready to go. I put the daypack on my back, grabbed the small ice chest with the shoulder strap that carried our lunch, and we started off.

From this point, our only access to the rest of the claim was a trail where the flume had been. There were no “banks” to the creek. We waded across, and started up the bedrock face at the point where the dam had been. There were enough handholds and footholds so that this was not a problem. Up on top there were rotting timbers in a pile, which must have been used for repair on the flume, and the small flat area was littered with square nails. We were about 60 feet above the creek. I could see the trail just to where the mountain jutted out to a point, and then a turn hid it from view. The trail was wide with a flat area on the creek edge, and I was pleasantly surprised. Actually, in all the concerns I had had about coming to this area, this trail had not entered my mind before now, which surprised me, since I have a terrible fear of heights. When we reached the point where the trail turned, I looked back at our camp. I turned back. From this point on the trail was narrower, so I spent all my time looking at my feet. It was also covered with leaves from trees and bushes above, and slick. My feet were still wet from crossing the creek, so I had to step carefully. There was no longer anything between the trail and the edge, and as I followed carefully, I noticed that the creek was getting much further below us. That’s when it occurred to me that the flume would have to stay level, but the natural drop in the creek was a pretty good one, so the further we went along, the further above the creek we would be.

I had dropped a little behind since I was going more slowly, so I paid attention to what I was doing, and tried to catch up. The further I went, the narrower the trail seemed to be. With the loaded daypack on my back, and the hard plastic cooler slung over my shoulder I was off balance a bit, and I soon found myself hugging the mountainside and creeping even more slowly than before.

All of a sudden, I almost ran right into Bill! As I looked up, surprised, he went around me and it was to see David in front of me, across a space where there was no trail at all! A slide had taken the entire trail, but there were places where he had scuffed out just enough space for one foot at a time across what seemed like a vast six-foot space. He was reaching his hand out to me and saying “…Now, Mom, this is going to be easy. Just put your feet right into my footprints. Dad will hold you from that side, and I’ll get you from this side as soon as I can. You’ll be past it in no time.”

Now, this child is talking to a person he knows doesn’t even climb a ladder; who is totally un-athletic, and who is already pretty strung out after the trip in to this claim and the “fun” of setting up camp for two days. I just looked at him, but he remained calm. He continued to talk to me as if I were a child while I stood there with my face pressed to the mountainside, loaded down with gear.

I looked down again at the footprints David had made on the bare mountainside. Since there was nothing else there, and it was straight down to the water (about 100 feet below us at this point), it wasn’t hard to imagine my body splattered, spread-eagled, on the huge boulders at the bottom. I pressed my face back against the mountainside, and told him to give me a minute. Well, I told myself, here you are–you knew something like this was coming–either you put your feet forward, or you turn around and everyone goes home. All the work up to this point has been wasted, and you’ll never ever do this. I knew I was not really ready to go home, so I decided not to think about it–block it out–and I looked at David and said “Don’t think you’re going to get off lightly for this one. Give me your hand again, and you’d better not let me fall!”

I don’t remember anything about crossing that space except that I was lightheaded and dizzy because I had to look down. I did cross it, however, and after that the rest of the trail seemed very good!

Bill and David had to spend the rest of the walk listening to what I thought of them for getting me into such a situation, and what we were going to do to the trail to improve it. They wisely made no comment or objection. By the time we reached the point where we were to go back down the mountainside, I was beginning to feel better.

On a previous trip down, David had taken a rope. Since the mountainside was so steep and we were now about 150 feet above the creek, he had it strung from tree to tree and cut some steps to help us get up and down. The only problem was that he, being 6’2″ tall, and having the legs of a giraffe, had cut steps for a much taller person. I ended up slipping and sliding down much more of the trail than I wanted to.

Numerous times my feet went out from under me trying to negotiate the long steps, and I would bump and slide (usually right into a “stickery” bush) while dangling from the rope by one arm. I had taken a few pry bars in one hand to leave each of them with one arm free. David apologized each time I’d fall, and promised to fix it the next day. By the time I reached the bottom I had big splotches of dirt, scratches, and bruises almost everywhere.

When we emerged from the trees at the creek we crossed again (which gave me an opportunity to wash off most of the dirt) and I noticed that it was much cooler. I looked up to see clouds moving in. We were soon at the dredge, however, and we all worked to get it set up and ready to go.

Once they’d donned their weight belts and fired up the dredge, I decided to take a break. David had been thoughtful enough to bring a folding chair with short legs–they are great for panning, and a real backsaver. I tried to find a sunny spot since it was now decidedly cold, but there didn’t seem to be one. I picked a flat place, pulled a book from my daypack, and sat down to read.

Suddenly, I sneezed six or seven times and my nose started running. Great! Now I was going to come down with a cold. Oh, well….I picked up the book again after digging out the Kleenex, and sat back with a sigh. As I leaned back in the chair, I encountered instant pain on my shoulder blade! It felt as if someone had just stabbed me with a long needle. I jumped up to find I had leaned against a bumblebee! That was it! My nose was running again, my shoulder was throbbing and everything to treat it with was clear back at camp, I was cold, wet, and tired! I stalked off into the trees. Although I’m sure you’d have a good laugh I’m not going to tell you just what I did there. Let’s just say I was riled.

When I came back I felt better except that my shoulder was killing me! I rummaged around in the daypack, looking for something I could use, but the only thing I could find was some aspirin. I debated taking a couple of them, but knew from experience that they didn’t help. My grandmother had always used a baking soda paste on bee stings so I moistened one aspirin, making a paste of it, and rubbed it right on the bee sting. I could hardly believe it, but it took the pain away in a very short time.

Once again I settled back with my book (this time checking the chair for bees), and started reading. Before I finished the first page..Splat! A very large rain drop fell on the page, and I raised my eyes to look at the sky. I had been so involved with my problems I hadn’t noticed that there were huge thunderclouds above us, and all of a sudden they let go with a terrific storm. We were pelted by huge drops, lightning and deafening thunder. We quickly shut down and covered the engine, and hurriedly started back for camp. Arriving thoroughly soaked, I put a big pot of homemade soup on to cook, and then snuggled down at last in my sleeping bag with my book.

It rained all day, and steadily for two more days, which actually worked out quite well. It gave me time to get over my cold, and it gave all of us a chance to rest up from our hustle and bustle. We unpacked the books we’d brought along, and spent most of our time reading while we listened to the rain on the tent, surrounded by the sweet smell of wet pine, fir, and cedar.

By the time it was clear again, we were really ready to get busy! The first order of business was to improve the flume trail, however, and when we left camp that morning we carried a shovel and our small camp broom. On our way down to the dredge I swept a portion of the trail clear of leaves, and left the broom at the other end of them, to sweep a portion that night. While I did that, David went ahead and started working at re-cutting a trail into the side of the mountain where there was none. We left both the shovel and broom on the trail until all areas of it had been improved as much as possible.

The reason for wanting to dredge the lower end of the claim was because it made a bend near the bottom, and widened out into a series of pools interspersed with clumps of large boulders: an ideal place for gold to come to rest after its headlong plunge through the upper canyon which mostly had very shallow bedrock.

We did not have to dredge there very long to find out that many huge boulders had also come to rest in the same pools–they appeared to have been laid in by a master–each of them too large to winch. They were wedged in so tight we couldn’t even dredge between them!

After some discussion (always lively in our family) about where we were going to dredge next, a decision was reached and we dismantled the dredge, packed it up the mountainside, across the trail, and back down at the new site. We could not move more than a few feet without having to do this, due to the many huge boulders that were strewn throughout the canyon.

In addition to moving the dredge and accessories it was necessary to have boulder moving equipment. We’d made a portable mount for our 8000 lb. electric winch so it could be cabled to a piece of bedrock or large boulder, and set it up in succession with a small generator, 12V battery, and battery charger. It was necessary to have the battery charger to charge the battery fast enough to move several boulders at the same time. That meant that each of these items also had to be moved from place to place with the dredge, since there were boulders no matter where we dredged.

Our days soon settled into a routine. While I dressed Bill carried water from the creek. I put some on the stove while I washed up, and the warm water was used to soak lightweight soiled clothing during the day. Once the washing was in to soak I put more water on while I cooked breakfast, and by the time we had eaten, I had more hot water to wash dishes. I packed our lunch while they filled our solar shower bags and put them out on the rocks to soak up sun during the day. We then loaded up our backpacks and were off to the dredge.

At the end of the dredging day we cleaned the sluice, screened the concentrates and carried them back to camp with us, along with gas cans that needed to be filled, etc. After climbing to the trail, and then back down again when we reached camp, I washed the clothing that had been soaking all day, removed the clothing hung the day before from the clothesline, and hung up the new. Then, I showered in our shower room and started dinner.

By this time Bill and David had finished the cleanup of the day’s gold, and while they took showers I weighed it, recorded it, and put it away. After dinner they gathered firewood while I cleaned camp. Then we could relax around the campfire, but we were ready for bed early.

Most of the gold we found was beautiful– chunky, or nugget, gold. Due to the rapid drop in the creek and the force of water through the narrow canyon we found very little fine gold, or gold in the overburden.

Because we left camp unattended all day, we had debated long about where to keep it! Although I was not thrilled with the idea, we finally decided that the only way to keep it really safe was to bury it. There was a large area around camp that was deep, soft white sand. We picked an easily identifiable place between bushes, dug a hole, and buried it. After filling our second jar I went to the spot where we’d buried the gold, dug, and….Nothing!

Bill came over to help and soon David joined in. We couldn’t find it! We knew it had to be there, somewhere, so we fetched the shovel to dig out the entire area between the bushes. After digging a deep pit we finally retrieved it, with relief. We’d probably caused it to sink by digging all around it. I had a hard time letting it go again, but from then on we placed it in a metal tin, which went into a bag, placed directly on bedrock in an area where bedrock was shallower and marked it with some equipment we weren’t using.

We rarely took a full day off since we didn’t know how long we would be able to stay. We systematically worked our way down the creek dredging, and found some rewarding pockets of gold. Two small areas yielded 27 pennyweights apiece.

As we neared one boulder almost the size of a house, it paid better and better. The boulder was not sitting on bedrock but sat right on top of the material. When they began uncovering the material around it, they found two boulders on bedrock which were supporting it. The problem was that one of the boulders underneath was at a very precarious angle, and if the large one above had shifted at all, it would have rolled, smashing Bill, David, and the dredge.

They kept telling me they would quit working there before it became too dangerous, but they found two coins from the 1840s, and then one from the 1830s, then a 6 pennyweight nugget–they kept getting closer and closer…..All this time I tended the dredge and stared at the rock looming above them. If it had shifted I could probably get out of the way, but they would have no chance to. I knew they were getting nervous about it because one of them kept a hand on the boulder at all times, but they couldn’t seem to bring themselves to stop dredging there. I was beginning to feel panic. How was I going to get them to stop?

Finally, I tugged on both airlines and had them shut the engine down. I said “Look, I understand that you’re excited about what you’ve found, and what you could find, but no amount of gold is worth either one of you, let alone both. I can’t tell you what to do. That’s your decision to make, but I can’t stay here to watch you any longer, worrying every moment that that huge monster is going to fall.” I picked up the pack and said “I’m going back to camp and you do whatever you have to do.”

And, that’s just what I did. They showed up about an hour later. They had already moved the dredge over to work down a small set of falls near the boulder. They never did comment on what I had had to say, but they were pretty sober the rest of the day, so they had done some serious thinking about it. I think they were both ready to move, but each hated to be the one to say so.

As we worked down the small set of falls, the gold production fell off some. When they reached the bottom of the falls, however, there was a small pool, and they found some nice crevices carrying gold in the bedrock there.

Once Bill came up to the surface of the water and asked me to put his mask on. He’d uncovered a pocket of gold and wanted me to see it. I put it on, and holding my breath I put my face down in the water. Bedrock was only about five feet deep, and the water was so crystal clear the sun was shining through to the bedrock. There, right in a band of sunlight, was an inverted cone-shaped depression in the smooth bedrock, filled with sparkling, shining gold. It totaled one and one-fourth ounces, the largest pocket we’d found.

We followed the bedrock down another small set of falls into a larger pool where the recovery was also good. This was also one of the few places where fine gold was recovered; a small bank on one side widened the canyon just enough to let some fine gold settle.

Although days off were few, I did take a few mornings to do some baking. All three of us had huge appetites, but we all lost weight (I found the perfect waistline exercise–shoveling dredge tailings!). One morning I stayed in camp to bake a cake. We were working quite some way down the canyon, so David told Bill to stay there with me, he would dredge alone (he wanted cake, too!).

We used an oven that sat on our propane stove which had a thermostat. But since it was outdoors, if a breeze came up the temperature fluctuated quite a bit, and it helped to have someone sit there to let me know when the temperature changed. I mixed up the cake, beating it by hand, and put the first half in the oven. While it baked I started some of the cleanup, and was humming along with the radio as I worked. Never has a cake smelled so good, or the scent filled the air as that one did.. David said later that he could smell it way downstream at the dredge. It was a beautiful day, and I had placed a big bunch of wildflowers gathered from a nearby spring, that morning, on our table. Birds were chirping, our friendly chipmunks were waiting in the bushes for any scraps we might have for them, hummingbirds were fighting over the feeder that hung from the edge of our tarp frame, and all was right with the world. Or, so I thought!

A year later, after hearing about it from someone else first, Bill related that he had just happened to glance up at the trail when all of a sudden a bear shuffled around the point, headed our way. It had evidently smelled the cake, too! He casually got to his feet and went to the tent, and when my back was turned grabbed his gun from the pack and laid it next to him on his chair, out of my sight. I was still humming along with the radio, cleaning up, and when I burst into song the bear must have heard me. Bill told me the bear looked up and saw us, and sniffed the fragrant air. Instead of coming on, however, he sniffed again, then turned around and went the other way.

Knowing that I would leave if I saw a bear, Bill took David aside when he returned to camp for lunch and told him about the bear. David left camp before we did that afternoon, to brush all the tracks from the trail. From then on, he left camp every morning before us and kept the trail swept for me. They enjoyed putting one over on me, and there were no further sightings of any large animals.

I was 48 years old that summer, and I really cherish the experiences we shared. Our lives took another direction not long afterward, and I don’t know that I will ever again be able to do something like that. It was a lot of work, but the rewards were great enough to make it very worthwhile. I am not speaking of the monetary rewards, although they were good; the rewards I am speaking of are less tangible, but greater. We did something that not many ever have the opportunity to do today, and that experience will always be with us.

We went back to the claim the next year. This time three other families (our partners) and another of our sons went also. That year brought its own unique experiences, mostly good ones, but it just wasn’t quite the same as the year that Bill, David, and I had our “Great Adventure” in the wilderness.

And by the way, that pan of gold up there is holding almost all of our “take” for the six weeks we spent there that year; our first pound of gold (1 lb., troy weight) found in a summer!

 

By Marc Rogers

Gold prospector makes the best of new-found opportunities

A gold pan for Christmas! That’s what Philip received from his brother-in-law about eighteen years ago, and it gave him a good excuse to try panning on the streams that ran through the family ranch in Colorado. He didn’t find any gold on the ranch, but that didn’t stop him. He just started ranging out into other nearby areas to do his panning, places where gold had been found in the past.

He soon found himself spending more and more of his free time panning for gold, looking to find more of the shiny flakes he panned from the crystal clear streams. It was exciting each time he found a new spot that turned up some “color”, and he liked it! He continued panning until about 1980. When the price of gold went up so high, he decided it was time to buy a dredge; and he started taking at least part of every summer off to look for gold. All of his dredging was in Colorado for awhile, then he started wandering farther afield.

He spent some time one summer in Alaska; another year he spent some time in Arizona; and one year he went to Nevada. He found some gold everywhere he went, but not as much as he wanted to find.

He was working at strip mines during the winter months, but he wanted to spend more time gold mining, and finding more gold! Finally, in December of last year, he quit his job and went back to Arizona to look for gold.

While in Arizona he came across a copy of Gold & Treasure Hunter magazine, and liked what he read about The New 49’ers Prospecting Organization. Soon after, he met some New 49’er members, and was able to get further information from them. From the things they told him, this group seemed to be just what he was looking for. There was gold to be found, and without the type of hassles and problems that he’d encountered in the past, whenever he attempted to find a good place to dredge. Shortly thereafter he joined the club, and made plans to head up to Happy Camp early in the spring, taking his four-inch dredge along with him.

He arrived in Happy Camp before Memorial Day, and spent a little time asking questions before deciding where to dredge. He attended a couple of the Saturday evening group potlucks, asking questions of the members and Dave McCracken, to get an idea where he wanted to try first.

He finally decided to start dredging on one of the creek claims that had been in the club several years, but from what everyone had been telling him, had not been worked much.

He went up to look the area over and picked his location, based on what he’d been told by Dave and other 49er members. He knew the creek claims tended to have gold in pockets, and he might not find anything for awhile. But he also knew that everyone said there was nice coarse gold here–and that was what he was after! He wanted some “nice-sized gold,” instead of the fine gold that he had commonly found in the past!

As he set up in the creek and began to dredge, he tried to prepare himself for the possibility of not doing very well for a time. And then, Wow! The first time he checked his box, he had gold showing already!

Even though the creek water was cold, he was down there bright and early the next day, and every day that week. When potluck time rolled around the following Saturday, he had a nice-sized bottle of beautiful gold nuggets to show off! He worked there almost a month, until time for Dave McCracken’s weeklong dredging workshop for members, which he wanted to take part in. During that month, he had found 3 3/4 ounces of jewelry gold in his little spot!

After the workshop he felt more confident about working other areas; and since the gold was tapering off where he was, he moved on to another spot. He worked some of the larger creeks, and then on to the Klamath River, spending the entire summer, and part of the fall, dredging—and loving it! “The beauty, and the peace, of working in the river is spectacular!”

Philip is a hard worker when he’s dredging, and a little bashful, but he couldn’t help but make friends with a lot of the members. “They were all so helpful and friendly that I soon felt like they were family.” He soon found himself taking some time off for outings, with some of his new-found friends.

He had found that if he needed advice on where to dredge or how to get better recovery in a certain area, if he was having problems in any way, these friends would be right there to help. They respected his privacy, however, and that was one of the things he really liked about this group.

Then, as the days grew cooler and shorter, he began making plans to go back to work for the winter. As he prepared to leave town, he was enquiring about five and six inch dredges–it was hard to make up his mind just how much larger he wanted to go, but he was definitely going to have a larger dredge next year–this was FUN! “And, with the results I was getting with my four inch–Boy, what I might do with a six!” As he pulled out of town, he had a big smile on his face. He was already thinking of next year, and of all the gold and new adventures that awaited him.

 

 

By Dave McCracken General Manager

Dave Mack

 

   

Quite often in gold mining, your best-laid plans fall completely apart as soon as you get started. This happens to me on a regular basis. In late August, we had a firm plan to do a week-long dredging project on our Lower Seiad Claim (K-14). I know of a place there that should deliver up a substantial high-grade gold deposit. But the day before we were to start, a large truck drove off the highway and spilled some kind of oil into the Klamath River. Not wanting to take any chances of exposing our team to the possibility of hazardous material, we decided at the last minute that we needed to do our dredging project upstream from the oil spill. So we went up to UK-3. Through just several hours of sampling, we got right into a rich pay-streak up there. Everything turned out alright in the end. I suppose the lesson in this is that in prospecting, you just have to adjust yourself to setbacks when they happen and keep on moving forward.

Then, since we had not finished up the rich deposit that we found on UK-3 in August, we were planning to go back in there on our September group dredging project and pick up right where we left off. It is a lot of stress off my shoulders to begin a dredging project in an already-established pay-streak. This allows me to put more of my personal focus on working with the project participants. Out of the 15 people associated with the September project, 9 of them had never even breathed off a hookah-air system before. Wow; that is a lot of beginners to get grooved into an underwater program all at once! So already having an established high-grade gold deposit in place meant that we would not have to sample. This was good!

As these group projects only last a week, and the first and last days are mostly devoted to orientation, moving gear on and off the river and final gold clean-up, there really are only 5 production days to make the gold add up. Making the gold add up is important to the last day when it is time to split it off amongst all the participants. I know this better than anyone, because I am the one that weighs and splits each share. The bigger the share, the better it feels when you get it! So every day matters to the final outcome!

It is also true that a beginner who is worried about drowning in the river does not care very much at that moment about how much gold is being recovered. That person just wants to stay alive!

I devote a lot of the season helping beginners through the early stages of underwater mining. So I have an intimate understanding of the different feelings and motivations.

First of all, I just want to say that everyone has a primal fear of drowning. It’s really a matter of how energized that fear is at the moment. I’m a strong swimmer and spend a lot of my time around the water. So I am reasonably comfortable under normal (for me) circumstances. But when I tried surfing several years ago in Maui, and found myself tumbling head-over-heals along the underside of a big wave, I immediately tuned into a panicked madman fighting for my own life. It didn’t feel like I was going to live through it! After that, I was afraid every time I tried to catch a wave. Numerous times when I really had the opportunity to catch a great wave, I chickened-out and decided not to go for it. I never did learn to surf very well. I’m afraid! So it is easy for me to identify with the fear that others experience around the water. That fear is very serious stuff!

Many beginning participants on these group dredging projects arrive with a healthy fear of the water. Some have had earlier traumatic experiences. Some were born with fear of the water. Some just have a healthy respect. With 9 beginners in this project, I knew that a lot of my personal focus would need to be devoted to helping them get through the beginning steps of dredging.

Just for the record, these group mining projects are not a school or a class. They are joint mining ventures where all participants work together as a team to locate high-grade gold deposits and recover as much gold as we can out of them by the end of the week. Those that are not able to contribute to the underwater work are utilized in other activities on the surface to help with forward momentum. Those that do not know how to do the underwater activity, but who wish to contribute there, are helped through the beginning stages so they can become more productive to the group venture. Everyone (including me) learns something on every mining project. I’m sure that is true of any type of activity where a person is personally challenged. As the project manager, without compromising safety, my personal job is to get as much productive activity as I possibly can out of each member of the team. More productive activity channeled in the right direction will produce more gold by the end of the week. This makes everyone happy with the final result.

Showing someone how to get comfortably underwater during the first few days of a dredging project means that we will have yet another person helping us to recover high-grade gold later in the week. Therefore, my plan on this project was to direct our 5 more-experienced participants to get started in the established pay-streak right away, while I invested my time working with the beginners. This way, we would be accumulating gold from the very beginning. That is always a great way to start!

And here is just one more example (of many) of how a great mining plan fell apart even before we got started: We arrived on UK-3 on Saturday afternoon, only to discover that the Iron Gate Dam had increased its water release that very same morning, causing the river to rise about 18 inches in the section of river where we had intended to dredge. This made the water flow there too fast for us to dredge! So much for that plan!

One thing I have learned is that dwelling on problems or failures does nothing to increase the size of gold shares at the end of a project. So after allowing myself just a brief moment of personal disappointment in the realization that we would need to find another high-grade gold deposit with just 5 people, our newly-formed team did a complete survey of the UK claims in search of a new place to begin a sampling program.

The river was running higher and faster. So our options were actually reduced to just several locations. Each of these looked pretty good. As a group, we always allow some time to discuss each option. There is often some debate on these matters, but I must ultimately make the final decision. This time, we decided to go down to the upper part of UK-2. Mainly, this was because we had left some high-grade gold behind there during an earlier dredging project (last season). In addition, longtime supportive member, Lee Kracher, happened by at just the right moment and told us that his son had been pulling a lot of gold out of the river not far downstream from where we had already mined some high-grade along the upper portion of UK-2. I assumed this was probably an extension of the very same deposit we had been mining the year before. As Lee said his son was pulling out gold through the last day of his vacation, this area seemed pretty-much like a sure thing for our project.

I always go for the most sure thing I can find when results really matter! Our new plan required us to work until dark on the first day to get all of our dredging gear moved to our new project site.

Luckily, Craig Colt and Jason Inks were along to give us a hand on this project. Both have extensive experience in serious dredging and team management. We split up our experienced participants into two teams on the morning of the second day; with Craig’s team operating the 8-inch dredge, and Jason’s team operating the 6-inch dredge.

   

Because every day counts, we set realistic targets every morning. These are the things that we must accomplish to ultimately achieve our objective (plenty of gold) by the end of the week. Craig’s and Jason’s targets on Sunday were to both get their teams established in the pay-streak before the end of the day. We positioned their dredges downstream of where we had been dredging high-grade last season and they didn’t waste any time getting started.

Then we set up a 5-inch dredge just off a shallow sand beach where I could work with the beginners. I always begin with those who seem like they will get through the initial steps quickly. Those persons are then directed to operate the 5-inch dredge as part of the ongoing sampling program, while I work with the participants who will require more time along the edge of the river. As soon as they demonstrate that they are up to it, some beginners graduate off to help on one of the other dredges where they can be more productive. By more productive, I mean that a good sampling program requires that we do sample holes out into the deeper, more challenging parts of the river. Sometimes, this is where the richest gold deposits are found. Sampling for high-grade is a lot like playing hide-and-seek. You have to be prepared to go anywhere the deposits might be located.

Starting into the third day, both of our serious dredges were pushing out further towards the middle of the river. While they were finding some gold and small nuggets in closer to the bank, we believed the gold was going to get better as we moved further out. It did, but it still was not as good as we wanted. So we decided to move the 6-inch dredge further upstream, closer to the area where we were mining rich gold the season before. By trial and error, we just kept up the process of doing small dredge samples here and there and checking the results to trace the gold into the richer portion of the pay-streak. The following video was captured just as Jason’s team was starting to uncover what we were looking for:

Shortly thereafter, Jason’s team started expressing the excitement of seeing gold while uncovering bedrock on the river-bottom. In other words, they were hooping and hollering it up pretty good. This is always a good sign to me that things are moving in the right direction.

“The first nuggets started coming up after we moved the 6-inch dredge further upriver”

By the end of the third day, all of our beginners (except for one person who insisted from the beginning that he was not going underwater) were through the initial learning curve and being productive underwater. So we moved the 5-inch dredge just upstream of Jason’s team, and they immediately also started uncovering high-grade gold along the bedrock. Everybody started getting pretty excited!

There is nothing quite like seeing gold nuggets on the bottom of the river to help a person get over their initial fear of the river! I’m serious! It is always good to try and get a beginner extroverted. A good way to do that is to get the person helping to uncover high-grade gold from the bottom of the river!

Some participants arrive on these projects with deep-seated fears or phobias of the water. Some participate with the hope of overcoming these fears. Others arrive with no intention of going underwater; they just want to help on the surface. This is alright with me. We talk this all over as a group on the first day, and always then move forward with an understanding that everyone will just participate the best that they can to help get the job done. It is important to get the right kind of team chemistry in place on the first day. Working together with a good team, so far, we have always managed to locate high-grade gold.

Interestingly, everyone I have worked with that has started out with a serious fear of the water goes through very similar stages as the fear is overcome. I always just start the person out doing something that he or she is comfortable with – like just sitting or standing alongside the river without a face mask, getting used to breathing through a hookah regulator. Sometimes this first step is the most difficult in the whole chain of progressive steps! It is not unusual for someone’s body initially to reject having a regulator in his or her mouth (creates an impulse to gag it out). Still, a person standing up on the bank has little to fear from putting the regulator back and trying to breathe from it some more. Amazingly, the body always makes its own adjustment about this rather quickly all on its own. It is not a mind process. Thinking or talking about it does not seem to help very much with the process. The answer is to just keep the regulator in the person’s mouth until it is no big deal anymore. This usually happens pretty fast if the person just does it.

The next step is to have a person just get comfortable wearing a face mask. Sometimes we start out with this step before the regulator. It doesn’t really matter. But, if we are trying to overcome a healthy fear, we always do these two steps by themselves, before we ask the person to wear the face mask and breathe through the regulator both at the same time. It is just a simple matter of taking things one step at a time. No big deal. This all plays out alongside the edge of the river, while the bigger sampling program out in the river is being moved forward by the more experienced participants

Everyone has a threshold where traumatic fear overcomes everything else. This is commonly referred to as “panic.” That’s the place where you lose personal control and totally freak out! Water can bring that threshold very close to the surface with some beginning dredgers. I have worked with so many people on this over the years that I have developed an intimate sensitivity to what people are going through. The important key is to avoid pushing someone beyond his or her personal threshold of fear.

The step-by-step routine works every time. Most of the process is just to get the person’s body accustomed to being in a different environment. That’s all.

Once the person can breathe comfortably through the hookah regulator while looking through the face mask (even while standing or sitting alongside the river), the person has already made it well beyond the half-way point in getting comfortable underwater.

This all gently progresses to having the person float around in shallow water along the edge of the river while looking underwater through the mask and breathing through the regulator. Here is another milestone in the program, because the body initially doesn’t believe that it can breathe with your face in the water. Again, the key is just to do it!

The internal fear almost always presents itself in discussions, like “I have never been a mouth-breather.” I have found that discussions usually do not help very much with the progress. So I just coax the person to just keep putting his or her head in the water as much as he or she can tolerate until the body makes an internal adjustment. Initially, the person never believes that the body will adjust. That is just part of the internal fear being expressed. The body always adjusts just by doing it. It usually happens very fast. Because personal embarrassment also comes out with the fear, I usually back off a bit and just allow the person to work through this on his or her own. I usually only step in when I see the person is not continuing to put his or her face in the water. That’s the key. In 25 years of helping beginners, I have never seen a time when the person did not get through this step very quickly, as long as the person just stuck with it.

Usually, within just a short time, the person is swimming around comfortably while looking around at the fish, or watching the dredging program if it is close enough to be seen. That’s when I go over and gently press the person underwater. This step is always done in shallow-enough water that the person can push his or her head above the water’s surface if he or she feels the need to do so. They almost never do, though. By now, the person is already through most of the fear. This is relatively an easy step in the progress.

Then I straddle a set of weights across the person’s back to let him or her sink to the bottom in shallow water. This is also an easy step, because the person always finds that he or she has more personal control with the weight, than when I am holding him or her down. Soon thereafter, I buckle the weights onto the person to keep them from slipping off. The person has now comfortably made it to the bottom of the river. It’s not so difficult as long as we don’t try to move things along too fast and overstep beyond the person’s fear threshold.

In dredging, it is important to be weighted heavily to the bottom of the waterway. But the heavy weights usually make a person a bit top-heavy. Because of this, you cannot swim or walk around very effectively. The right way is to crab around on the bottom using your hands and legs. Balance is everything.

The final step in the process of helping a beginner is always to have the person go underwater and roll over onto his or her back, and then roll back over again. We do this several times. About the worst thing that can happen is that you lose your balance and roll onto your back like a turtle. So, in shallow water, we just get the person to do this right away and get it over with! I am always standing right there with the person’s hookah line in hand – more for moral support than anything else. Once a person has rolled around on the bottom of the river a few times, the body will automatically learn how to maintain its own balance. From there, the rest is pretty easy.

Until the person as demonstrated an acceptable level of personal confidence, we usually have someone keep a firm grip on his or her hookah airline just for safety. Although, to date, I have never actually had to drag anyone in by their airline.

Really, it is amazing how fast people adjust to the underwater environment! Most people have more courage than they allow themselves credit for. The following video sequence was captured while several of our beginners were working through the process:

Out of our 9 beginners on this project, the 4 woman got through the initial learning curve surprisingly fast. This was probably because they were giving each other a lot of assistance and moral support. By mid-week, we had woman dredgers helping with an important portion of the underwater work on both the 5 and 6-inch dredges. The following video was captured just as the two dredges were beginning to recover high-grade gold:

Everyone was so excited about it, on the 5th day; even the guy who insisted that he would never go underwater decided he wanted to give it a try. As he had spent so much time watching the others learn how to do it, it only took him about an hour to get underwater. Now 100% of our dredging team was working in the water.

While we had both the 5 and 6-inch dredges into high-grade on the third day, we could not set up the 8-inch dredge there because of the way the river was flowing in that particular location. There simply wasn’t enough room. That was too bad, because the 8-inch dredge will process more stream-bottom than the 5 and 6-inch dredges combined. This is especially true when Craig Colt is operating the suction nozzle!

Craig’s team pushed their downstream sampling program further out beyond the middle of the river in search of high-grade. But they still had not struck the pay-dirt that we were looking for. In a sampling program, if what you are doing is not producing adequate results, you try something else. And you just keep trying different things until you find something good. The problem here was that we only had several days to make it all happen. We were running out of days!

So once all of our beginners were safely established underwater, I personally took on the mission of locating the dredge excavation which Lee Kracher’s son had made earlier in the season. Nobody was quite sure where that was. We could not see where it was from the surface of the river. Lee had pointed downstream and across the river. That’s all we knew. Since they had recovered high-grade from that location, our plan was to move the 8-inch dredge over there for our next sample. We were feeling a strong need to do something effective, and soon!

I take the opportunity to do a lot of underwater prospecting during these projects. By this, I mean swimming around underwater to have a look at what is on the bottom. It’s the only way I know of to see what is down there! By doing a survey of the bottom, I can see where the bedrock is visible and what it looks like. Seeing exposed bedrock will allow our team to dredge samples nearby without having to go through deep streambed material (which takes more time and effort).

Surveying the river-bottom also allows us to discover where the hard-packed natural streambed is and where the boulders are. It also allows us to see where others have dredged before. I almost always swim around and survey the bottom of the river before deciding where we will dredge sample holes.

There are two ways I know of to survey the bottom of the river. One is to put a long extension of air line on your dredge’s hookah air system; like about 200 feet. Then, with your weights on, you can survey a big area around where your dredge is floating.

The other way is to float with the flow of the river, diving down on single breaths of air, to get a look at the bottom. Doing this without a wet-suit makes it easier to get down to the bottom and stay there longer. While you cannot stay down very long on a single breath of air, not being connected to anything allows you the freedom to survey long stretches of river.

Depending upon the circumstances, sometimes we float long stretches of river holding onto the bowline of my boat, just drifting along with the flow. It’s amazing how much you can discover about a stretch of river just by swimming it a few times! The following video sequence was captured while I scanned the river-bottom of UK-2 looking for that pre-existing dredge hole that Lee told us about:

It just took a little while for me to find the excavation which Lee’s son had left behind. While swimming along, I just kept looking for a dredge hole, a cobble pile or the tailings. I spotted the cobbles first. This turned out to be big hole; Lee’s son had done a lot of work! Fortunately, the excavation was just as he left it. He had been dredging in about 5 feet of original hard-packed, gray-colored Klamath river-bottom material. There were some large boulders visible. It would have taken us the better part of a full day or longer just to open up a good sample in this same location using the 8-inch dredge. Luck was on our side that someone else had already accomplished all that work for us and made the gold discovery there. It was going to be easy for us to go right into production in this hole!

This is one of the great things about being a member of The New 49’ers; it seems like someone is always coming along and letting you in on some already existing, exciting opportunity!

To save time, we just put the 8-inch dredge nozzle in the front of the boat, and I reverse-motored the whole platform across the river. This is a common way for us to move a dredge around when sampling in slower-moving water. Once to the other side of the river, all we had to do is tie the dredge off and go to work. The following video segment shows how we transferred the whole 8-inch dredge program from one side of the river to the other:

Two hours later, we had our first high-grade clean-up on the 8-inch dredge. The following 2 video segments were able to capture some of the excitement (and relief) we all felt when we finally got the 8-inch dredge into high-grade gold:

By Wednesday afternoon, all three dredges were in high-grade gold and all of our beginners were helping push underwater production forward. That sure was a long way from where we began at the beginning of the week!

As is normal, there was not much for me to do on Thursday. Our whole group had already pulled together as a polished team. Everyone already knew everything that needed to be done. Those that were so frightened of the river early in the week had long-since evolved into experienced gold dredgers who were working together with the team to recover as much gold as we could in the time remaining to us. I could have taken the day off and probably nobody would have even noticed! I always find myself feeling a bit helpless towards the end of these projects when everyone else is doing all the work and there is little for me to do.

   

Because so much time is required to do the whole process, we always accumulate our concentrates in a bucket throughout the week and do the full gold clean-up on the final day. We also needed to pull all of our dredging gear off the river this time, because it was the end of our dredging season along the upper Klamath River. We all worked together on this. Fortunately, there are several river access points down towards the lower-end of UK-2. We used the boat to tow all 3 dredges down there. Then we used the electric winch mounted in the back of my truck to load the dredges on trailers, tie them down and hoist them up to the road. Even the 8-inch dredge came up the hill without a single hitch! The following video sequence captured how smoothly the whole process went:

“Dave Beatson from New Zealand”

We often have visitors in Happy Camp from other countries. This time, we were honored with the presence of David Beatson, who is a very enthusiastic gold prospector from New Zealand. David is one of those rare individuals that always adds more life and fun to the party. He also carries a big part of the work load! It was interesting to listen to David talk about his gold mining adventures in New Zealand. There is a common bond created amongst gold miners that cannot be duplicated in most other types of endeavors. Here follows some of what David had to say:

This season, we were also rewarded with the presence of Otto Gather on all of the group projects. We call Otto “Mister Mom,” because everyone looks to him to provide all of the important basic necessities, whether it is a cup of coffee in the morning, fuel to keep the dredges operating, a spare part, a Band-Aid, or even a spanking if you deserve one. I’m not talking about anything kinky here. Otto has a kind way of telling a person to quit being a sissy just at the time you need to hear it! He adds much-needed life and substance to these projects that make them better for everyone.

Final clean-up was finished in camp on late Friday afternoon. All participants are always encouraged to participate in the final clean-up. Because we accumulate so much gold, there is actually quite a lot of work involved! The following video sequence captured the highlights of the full process which we normally follow:

“Otto Gather provided a lot of help on this year’s group mining projects!”

Altogether for the week, we recovered 118.4 pennyweights (5.92 ounces) of beautiful gold. That included 27 pennyweights of very nice nuggets to go around. Everyone was pleased with the result, and we all said our goodbyes before going our separate ways. This was the end of another very special chapter in each of our lives.

 

 

By Dave McCracken General Manager

Dave Mack

 

 

It’s always a great feeling for me to watch one high-grade gold discovery evolve into another exciting discovery through just a little more sampling further upstream. This substantiates our long-established theory that most high-grade gold deposits follow a common path down along the bottom of a gold-bearing waterway. More often than not, further sampling along the same path upstream or downstream from an already established high-grade pay-streak in the river will turn up additional rewarding gold deposits, sometimes even richer than the first!

And that’s what happened in this case. The first high-grade pay-streak that we located was directly at the top-end of the (very) extensive gravel bar near the top-end of K-15A (Mega-hole claim). You can read about how we made that fantastic discovery during a surface mining (high-banking) project in our July newsletter.

The thing that made this event so interesting is that it was the first time that we ever tracked the Klamath River’s gold path from a high-grade deposit up on a gravel bar to high-grade gold out in the active river; very exciting indeed! No doubt, this will have us taking a fresh look at other sections of the river this next season!

It was early during this past season, and Haze and Andi Williams had already consented to capture the video and photography for all of the week-long mining projects for the summer. They were also looking for a good place to put their new 5-inch dredge while they were in the process of filming the surface mining project in late June. So when Craig Colt made the high-grade gold discovery at the top-end of the gravel bar on K-15A, we all did the natural thing; we looked just upstream in anticipation of what might be a continuation of the pay-streak. Haze and Andi moved their dredge into location just upstream only a few hours after Craig made that discovery. This turned out to be a really smart move! Not surprisingly, they found the very same type of gold (course and nuggety) in the very same type of streambed material (ancient, compacted, dark-colored) at about the same depth below the surface.

It only took a few dredge samples before Haze and Andi were in high-grade gold just upstream from the gravel bar where Craig had made the original discovery. They were into it pretty good just before we started this dredging project. The nice thing about this deposit was that it was located in shallow, slow-moving water, not far from the edge of the river. This was a very safe place for beginners to dredge. Since they were going to be involved with this dredging project anyway, Haze and Andi suggested that we start the project in the gold deposit they had just located. This sounded good to me. It’s always good to begin a week-long project in a place where we can start some of the dredges working in an established gold deposit!

There were 24 of us involved with this dredging project, including myself. The first thing we did was gain permission from a landowner living across the road from Highway 96 (a New 49’er member) who possesses an access road which would allow our group to gain an easy perch at the top-end of K-15A, near to where Andi and Haze had been dredging their gold. An access road was going to save our crew from making a pretty fair hike in and out of the site every day. That was good!

The first thing we do is set up a camping area where we can have our planning sessions each morning.

The first day on these projects is usually focused upon setting up a group camping area and launching all of our dredging gear into the river and setting it up. There is a wonderful, shaded camping area on K-15A. Once we were all set up there, all I had to do was make a comment that the access road needed a little work before we could launch our dredges. By the time I got over there, the work had already been completed and we had easy access to the river, along with a nice place to stage the beginning of our program. It was great! This crew was so geared up to go, I quickly realized that it was time to assign some team leaders and let them get to work!

Andi and Haze offered us the use of their dredge, so we added an additional airline to allow a second person underwater. This team was so motivated, that we had a team already working in gold before lunch on the first day! As Haze and Andi were tied up capturing video and photography, others completely took their dredge over for the whole week and they didn’t seem to mind. They were showing off nice gold on that dredge just within the first few hours. That got the whole team pretty excited!

The team got right to work on Haze & Andi’s dredge!

The rest of our team stayed busy on the first afternoon launching a 4-inch dredge, two 5-inch dredges and a 6-inch dredge. Craig Colt had just finished devoting 3+ months into building the best 8-inch dredge ever made for the Klamath River. But we wanted to establish a good gold deposit where we could use it, before launching that beast into the river!

We placed the 4-inch dredge in shallow water just off the little perch that we had made, a perfect place where we could show beginners how to do the underwater work. This location was about 150 feet directly upstream from where Andi and Haze had been dredging some very nice gold, so the prospects were pretty good that our beginners would also find something good on the bottom.

During the first several days on these projects, we are more concerned with just helping beginners to overcome the underwater environment in a location where the water is slow and shallow enough so that there is very little danger of having any accidental traumatic encounters. It’s not uncommon for some participants to arrive who have some fear of the water, perhaps from an earlier near-drowning event. We have found that the key in helping someone to overcome these fears (if they want to try), is through a progression of easy steps, starting with something which nearly anyone can do.

The following video sequence captures how we follow a step-by-step process to help beginners become a productive part of the underwater mining crew:

This was a very easy location where beginners could learn!

The place where we set up the 4-inch dredge on this project was about the easiest I have ever seen. There was a shallow, even bottom in clear water where beginners were able to get used to crawling around along the bottom of the river in a safe place. It wasn’t long before all of our beginners were down helping in the dredge hole!

By the end of our second day, all of our beginners had eagerly progressed through their early steps and were contributing to forward progress in the water.

All of our beginners were initially assigned to the 4-inch dredge on this project. The rest of the crew was teamed up on the other dredges. One dredge was used to put down a sample hole about half way between the 4-inch dredge and Haze’s dredge. With good luck going our way, that dredge touched right down on beautiful gold within the first few hours.

Another dredge was sent several hundred feet upstream from the 4-inch dredge to do another test hole. But it could not find any hard-pack streambed up there. After several

tries, we decided that the river dynamics in that area did notallow hard-pack to form during previous major flood storms. Ultimately, that dredge was drifted down to work side-by-side with another dredge in the pay-streak.

The 6-inch dredge was drifted across the river to dredge some samples on the other side. This, because some members had reported several years ago that they were finding nice gold over there mixed with pieces of metal from some kind of old Chinese camp. This all took place at the top end of K-15A. But we were not able to find hard-pack streambed on the far side of the river, and did not want to invest very much time over there since we were doing so well on the road-side. One hard effort was made to dredge a sample in the middle of the river, but we gave up when the loose streambed material reached around 6 feet deep.

Meanwhile, our hard-charging beginner-team on the 4-inch dredge had managed to establish a pretty high-grade portion of the pay-streak in about 4 feet of hard-pack streambed, just behind a major change in bedrock. This turned out to be the reason for the pay-streak in the first place. There was a 4-foot bedrock drop-off; behind which, was filled with a hard-packed assortment of boulders and ancient hard-packed material. Here, beautiful golden nuggets were found along the bedrock. Once again, the beginner-team had walked right into the richest part of the pay-streak! With lots of excitement, the guys and gals on that crew worked out a continuous round of shifts, only shutting down the dredge long enough to put more fuel in the tank.

Here follows a video segment of a 4-inch clean-up that Haze captured during one of the first few days. It’s not surprising that the beginners learned how to dredge so quickly!

The beginner-dredge was bringing up nuggets on nearly every dive!

There was plenty of hooping and hollering going on about the beautiful nuggets being found on the 4-inch dredge. The nicest gold from the week was found by people who had never even operated a dredge before!

When some of the boulders were too large to move by hand, as a team effort, we moved in winching gear and attempted to pull them out of the way. Several of the huge rocks proved to be even too large for our winch, so they still remain in place, probably sitting on top of the best gold nuggets!

By mid-week, we had strategically positioned five dredges on top of the pay-streak and evolved ourselves into production operation. Here follows a video sequence of the productive activity once our team really got dialed in:

A sixth dredge was floated further down K-15A to sample for more high-grade gold deposits. My trusty helper, Craig Colt and I supervised this sampling, because most of it was done in either deep or very fast water.

All in all, we completed 5 good sample holes in several hundred yards of river. Each of the holes were put down to bedrock in ancient, original Klamath River streambed (never been mined before).

Because Andi and Haze had donated a pay-streak to this project that was easy to work in a location where there was near-zero risk that anybody could be hurt (slow, shallow water), we were in a unique position where Craig and I could run off with the most experienced participants and do some serious sampling. So we took the opportunity to place several sample holes down in a part of upper K-15A that we didn’t (until then) know anything about. The risk in this type of sampling is that we might not find much gold. Since we already had 5 dredges producing in gold, our group unanimously agreed that the risk was worthwhile just to see what we might find in that virgin section of the river.

Dredging sample holes in deep or fast water areas that you know nothing about is a very challenging activity; definitely not for the light-hearted! The main challenge is that you usually don’t know how deep the streambed is going to go before you reach bedrock. This leaves you with all kinds of uncertainties along the bottom of the river. The best thing to do is just pour on the steam the best you can. And it’s always a great feeling when you do reach the bottom! The whole program feeds on a never-ending stream of hope. Here follows a video segment captured as our sampling program was happening out on the water:

We were severely challenged by one section of very fast water which we believed, because of the difficulty, nobody had ever sampled before. The following video sequence captured some of the team spirit and fun involved in our sampling effort. Keep in mind that this is all the real thing. There is no play acting here. There is just a video camera that happens to be present while we were doing the work:

There was gold in each of the holes, but not the high-grade we are looking for. That’s just that way it goes in sampling; every stretch of river does not give up high-grade on our first pass through the area. Still, we did establish to our own satisfaction that most of this portion of the Klamath River remains void of any previous mining activity. This is a very good thing! The gold is there. It will just take some time to find it!!

  

Since K-15A is so close to Happy Camp, I was going home every night. Andi and Haze were also returning to Happy Camp. So they were able to capture amazing video footage of a forest fire that had just started up from a massive thunder storm during the dredging project. The fire was so severe, for several days, there was talk of evacuating the whole town!

We were fortunate to have Otto Gaither back this season as our shore boss. Otto adds a wonderful human touch to these projects. While Craig and I are more focused on the production-side of things, Otto is more concerned with making sure that people are eating right. Otto also started managing the beginner-dredge on this project, and the beginner-dredge has been breaking production records ever since. Everybody was raving about the meals at Otto’s camp during the mornings and evenings.

There is always a magic cultural chemistry which comes together in these projects, each one distinctly different from the rest – always with Otto at the center. And this project was no different. Towards the last day, when we realized that, as hard as our advanced team had worked in our extreme sampling efforts to locate some exciting, new high-grade, it was going to be the hard work of our main crew under Otto’s leadership, in a gold deposit that had been freely contributed by Haze and Andi, that was going to carry our week. And everybody was alright with that.

We pulled all of our gear off the river on the final day and performed a full clean-up of the week’s gold production. Everyone participates in every step of this process. Several other participants moved their personal dredges into the pay-streak to continue working it. Andi and Haze continued to work the same pay-streak throughout the remainder of the season, and did good until the cold weather chased them out. That was a great deposit!

  

All in all, we recovered 95.5 pennyweights of beautiful gold on this project, of which 56.3 pennyweights (more than half) consisted of nuggets. This allowed for just under a ¼-ounce share for each participant in the project.

 

 

By Sandy Waldie

“It’s that incredible feeling you get when you find your own gold,”

Rip traveled all the way from Maryland last season just to attend one of the New 49’er surface (out of water) group mining adventures. That was his first high-banking experience ever; and needless to say, from that moment on, he was hooked.

So Rip returned to Happy Camp early this season and proceeded to buy his own prospecting gear along with a used pick-up truck. He has been having a ball ever since.

Rip was born in Brooklyn New York, his east coast accent sounding out when he talks. He is now retired after 22 years as a life insurance salesman. He also owned a book distribution business where he supplied a variety of books to schools. Rip’s wife, Wanda, was born in Washington State and has a unique business which rents doves for various occasions, such as weddings, funerals, graduations, and more.

Rip and Wanda are planning to relocate in the Happy Camp area next year, and Rip already has some property picked out. He has fallen in love with this place in a big way, and he knows that his wife will feel the same way, once she gets here.

Both Rip and Wanda are avid metal detectorists. They have found lots of lost treasures while out walking the Maryland beaches. Rip cannot wait to get Wanda high-banking with him, knowing that she will be as “hooked” as he’s become. Not to mention all of the great places to metal detect around Happy Camp, as well. “It’s that incredible feeling you get when you find your own gold,” says Rip. “Especially the golden nuggets; that first moment of discovery creates a fantastic feeling of personal satisfaction.”

Rip really enjoys the great outdoors, the river and the abundant wildlife. He’ll tell you himself how prospecting is keeping him young, healthy, and definitely fit. You would never guess him to be 67 years old, and he has been known to run circles around some of the 30-year-olds in the area. Rip definitely has the right approach.

In doing this particular story, the one thing that really struck home with me is that this is a man who is truly happy. While I’m sure the gold is icing his cake, Rip is someone who has found peace and contentment in his life. His happiness with Happy Camp and The New 49’ers was captured pretty well (including the birds he listens to in the forest) in the following video sequence:

Although he started with the traditional method of high-banking (feeding the hopper with buckets of pay-dirt), Rip has moved on to his real love which is “booming”. This process uses the high-banker to feed water into a hole

(well up away from the active waterway) where pay-dirt material is then fed into a suction nozzle. Since his discovery of this technique, traditional high-banking is second place.

 

The area Rip has been working did not allow him to hold very much water up on the bank, so he devised a method of pumping water up from the river into his excavation area, and then moved his motorized pump up into the excavation so he could recirculate his own water as he worked the pay-dirt. This kept all sediments within his excavation, and the water was simply reabsorbed into the ground when he was finished each day.

Rip tells me that everything he knows and has learned about gold prospecting is thanks to Dave Mack’s books, DVD’s, and the talks that Dave gives before all of the outings. The biggest impression has been about the absolute necessity of sampling. Rip says that this one lesson alone has saved him full seasons of wasted time and effort.

Still, as Rip took the time to explain his personal mining program to me, it quickly became apparent that he has become somewhat of an expert in his own right. Dave would be the first to say that while the basic explanations are present in his material, the real key is in a person’s willingness and ability to apply him or herself to each separate situation. I found it very enlightening when Rip explained that he developed his own technique of finding gold traps along the bedrock by removing his work gloves and “looking” through the dirty water with the perception of his hands and fingers. He found some of his best gold nuggets using this technique!

We captured this following video sequence with Rip explaining how he located a thin layer of hard-packed streambed (pay-dirt with beautiful flakes and nuggets of natural gold) under about 2 feet of loose sand. Because of all that sand on the surface of the ground, this is a place where others never thought to search for gold. In looking around Rip’s work area, I could clearly see an extensive area along the property which has yet to be sampled by members (actually, this is pretty-much true along most of the Club’s 60+ miles of mining property!):

Rip is temporarily leaving Happy Camp to get things in order for his move out west. He has become such a fixture down on K-22, and around the office, that we will all miss his smiling face while he is gone. It has been fun watching his growth as a gold prospector this year.

We are happy to welcome Wanda to the New 49er family and look forward to seeing them both in the spring.

 

Waving  Final gold

There were 28 members who participated in this group outing. We also had two journalists along for the adventure. One of the journalists, Steve Werblow, is a freelance writer for Homestead Magazine which is an affiliate of the John Deere Magazine. He was writing about the “New Gold Rush” and the people who it has brought out prospecting. We also had a journalist all the way from France named Camille Le Pomellec. Camille was producing a documentary on the The New Gold Rush for a television station in France which is much like our HBO. They, and all of us, were in for a treat when Dave Mack decided to demonstrate the technique of “booming” on this group mining adventure.

As usual, we met at the New 49″er office in Happy Camp on Saturday morning so that all participants had an opportunity to register for the project and pick up any necessary supplies or equipment at the Pro-Mack store. Then we headed over to the Lions Club for Dave”s talk. For those who have never had the opportunity to attend one of these talks, or an outing, I would strongly urge you to fit it into your schedule. The valuable information and hands-on experience you receive will help you immensely in all your pursuits of gold. I”m not just saying this. Having attended all or most of the outings during the past two years, I believe that everyone who participates would agree that the experience is very valuable. Dave schedules five or six of these weekend projects every season. They are free to all New 49″er members. Each person who participates receives an equal share of the gold that is recovered.

Dave”s talk (about how to locate and sample for high-grade gold) ended at around noon on Saturday. The group broke for lunch and then proceeded out to K-15A to do an afternoon of sampling. This consists of panning materials and comparing the results from numerous places along a gravel bar to figure out where the strongest line of gold is ” and at what layer within the gravel the gold is located. By following this simple process, anyone can track down a good location where you can focus productive activity and recover more gold for your effort. Whether you are panning, sluicing, high-banking or suction dredging, a simple sampling program is the key to locating the higher-grade gold deposits.

K-15A has been one of our more popular mining properties this season. I believe this is mainly because Dave has directed multiple group outings along the upper-part of the property, each time with the participants recovering substantial amounts of gold. Members can then go out on their own after the organized project is finished.

A lot of members had been out there since our last project, so we were having trouble making a strike during the first hour or so on Saturday afternoon. While everyone was recovering some amount of gold, we were not getting the results that are needed to make the gold really add up in a high-banker on the following day.

Hard-pack“ is one of the most important things Dave demonstrates during these group outings. This is compacted streambed which has been deposited by a major flood storm. Since large volumes of gold only move in a waterway during major flood storms, Dave explains that high-grade gold deposits are nearly always located either on top or at the bottom of a hard-packed layer of streambed, or in the contact zone between different layers when more than one is present. This is one of the most important points that Dave stresses during these outings. He is always saying, “You are not even in the game unless you have found some hard-pack!” It”s one thing to read about this in a book. But it is incredibly valuable when you are just getting started to actually be able to see and dig in the right kind of streambed material! Luckily, I had the video camera handy while Dave was showing newcomers this important point:

Because gold is very heavy, it tends to travel down river along concentrated paths during large flood storms. Finding one of these paths is the first step in a sampling program. Since other members had pretty-much mined-out the rich gold deposit which we located during the previous outing, it was time to establish a new one. So Dave called team-leaders, Bruce Waldie, Terry McClure and Richard Krimm together and asked if they knew of any other gold lines along the gravel bar that had previously been established through sampling.

Both Richard and Bruce suggested that we move the sampling-effort down a bit closer to the river, in line with an area where we had done very well last season. Bruce had done some sampling down there earlier this year, and he was saying that the results were pretty good. As Dave explained during his lecture earlier in the day, getting hot tips like this from other members is one of the fastest and easiest ways to locate new high-grade gold deposits. So we gathered up the participants and redirected our sampling efforts to the new area.

Teaching gold panningThere is another very important thing that Dave demonstrates during these outings. He keeps saying, “Proper sampling is a very exact process.” Since most high-grade gold deposits are located either on top or at the bottom of a compacted flood layer, it is important to be very careful to first clear any sand, loose gravel or other low-grade material from the surface that you want to test. Then, you pass the exact material that you want to test through the proper size of classification screen. This way, you end up with the most concentrated sample that you can fit in your gold pan ” the stuff that is most likely to contain gold if it is present. As Dave explained to the group on this day, preparation of a pan sample in the first place is very likely to make the difference of finding or missing a pay-streak if it is present. Here follows a video sequence showing Dave and some helpers prepare a pan-sample off the top of a layer of some hard-pack:

Several experienced prospectors were out there helping newcomers dial-in their panning technique, and the very first pans in the new location started showing some really good results. Richard Krimm came up with a pan which was actually the best Dave had seen all season. That”s when I picked up the video camera and started capturing all the excitement. Here follows a video sequence with Dave explaining what was going on:

One of the reasons Dave was so excited is because the terrain within this new location was going to allow us to feed the high-bankers using suction nozzles. This is similar to suction dredging out of the water. But Dave was quick to explain that there is a big difference between dredging and booming. The term “booming” refers to how you use the suction nozzle attachment of the high-banker up on dry land. It actually has nothing

to do with an active waterway. .

BoomingThe truth is that it takes quite a lot of effort if you just pick up the suction nozzle outside of a waterway and start sucking material with it. This is because you have to lift the full weight of the nozzle, pressure hose and suction hose ” which are all filled with water. That”s a lot of weight to manipulate around if you want to operate the suction nozzle as we would normally do when dredging under the water.

In booming, you position your high-banker in such a way that the water which is flowing off the end of your sluice box can be utilized to wash your pay-dirt to your suction nozzle. The nozzle is set in the water (that runs down from your sluice box), while all the pay-dirt is pushed or raked into the flow and is then sucked up by the nozzle and directed to the high-banker”s recovery system. For the most part in booming, the nozzle remains stationary and your effort, along with the water-flow, is used to move the right kind of material to the nozzle.

In essence, you are re-circulating the water which comes off the sluice box. As in normal high-banking, the gold is separated and drops into the various types of matting inside your sluice box. This technique, when done correctly, allows you to process more pay-dirt than you would normally be able to accomplish with a pick, shovel and some buckets. It is wet, dirty, hard work, but sooooo much fun!

bucket brigade  Feeding high-banker

Everyone was anxious to get started on Sunday morning, so the day began at around 7:30 AM. Rich Krimm, one of the team leaders on this outing, had his high-banker in motion and the buckets were already moving steadily when I arrived. Other able bodies were put to work rolling aside rocks from the areas where the booming would occur. If you can remove as many big rocks as possible from your path, it will help you to process much quicker once you begin. Bruce Waldie, Terry McClure, and Ron Beondik assembled the other two high-bankers with their suction nozzles and prepared to begin booming.

Once the areas were cleared, Dave gave everyone direction on exactly what they would be doing, how they were to do it, and where they should start. Since we had established on the previous day that the high-grade pay-dirt consisted mainly of the top one-foot of material, Dave”s main direction to everyone was to not direct material into the high-banker from more than about one foot deep. The high-bankers can only process so much material in several hours, so we want to feed it only with the best material. This would mean that our personal gold-shares would be more valuable at the end of the day. Everybody liked the sound of that!

Soon, the water was flowing, mud was flying, and people were getting down and dirty! I have never seen people working so hard and having so much fun. They could have cared less about getting wet and dirty. It was all about moving as much material as they could towards the nozzle, allowing the water to accomplish a lot of the work. There was a continuous need to move rocks out of the way as they were uncovered; those that were too big to be sucked up the nozzle. Everyone was truly enjoying the day and each other.

Here follows a video sequence with Dave demonstrating what was going on, how a high-banker works, and how to do booming:

Le Trap sluiceAt lunch time, even after over three hours of mud, sweat, lots of water and moving rocks, I could not get anyone to break for lunch. No really; they did not want to get out of the water! Finally, they decided to break in shifts so they could keep the nozzles working. Stops only occurred when the engines ran out of gas, and once when we lost a hose clamp. What a dedicated group of people (or was it just gold fever?).
When Dave gave the signal to stop you could hear, “Ah please, just 5 minutes more”, “Not yet, we just cleared this area”, “It can”t be time already”, and so on. So Dave gave them their requested 5 minutes and then the motors were shut down. The clean-up from all three of the high-bankers looked really nice as it ran through the Le Trap concentrator. We were seeing some chunky gold and several nuggets.

Gold on white paperOne of the most important things I have learned from these projects is that successful gold mining is not just about hard work. To recover a lot of gold, you have to work hard at locating and processing the right kind of streambed material. Once you locate good pay-dirt through sampling, then you have to focus your work on processing just the high-grade material. Here follows a video sequence with Dave demonstrating this most important point:

Everyone pitched in to get all the equipment put away, clean up the area and fill in the holes that we had dug. There were a couple of working faces left open for those who would be returning to continue mining on their own. By “working face,” I mean the part of an excavation which meets up with pay-dirt that has not been worked, yet. Several participants were saying that they planned to return on Monday and pick up where we left off.

Team leadersAbout 30 minutes later, we found ourselves back at the Lions Club in Happy Camp where we were able to complete the final clean-up using a Gold Extractor. This is a specially-designed final clean-up device which eliminates most of the remaining black sand from your gold.

Then, as we were pouring the clean and dried gold through the final clean-up screens, we found that 9 beautiful pieces would not go through the 10-mesh screen. Those folks, are gold nuggets! That was a record for this year and brought on several hoops and hollers, not to mention lots of smiles. All in all, our total gold added up to ¾ of an ounce. Split up amongst 28 participants, everyone received a real nice share of gold for the work we had accomplished together.

“Terry McClure and Bruce Waldie enjoying the moment”

Gold nuggetsThis was my forth outing of this season, and I am so glad that I was able to be a part of it. I have met the greatest people, had a wonderful time, and I am a little sad each time an outing participant says goodbye for awhile. I can only tell you from my experience that if you find yourself with time, please come on out and visit with us, join us on an outing, enjoy the beautiful area around us and take home some fantastic memories. You won”t be sorry you came, and you will leave with more than you came with, in more ways than one. Please contact us to make reservations in advance!

Until the next outing, happy hunting.

 

 

By Sandy Waldie

Taking a break Feeding Le Trap

We had 54 New 49’er members participating on this particular group gold mining project. While this was not as many people as we had on the previous weekend project , they were every bit as enthusiastic and excited as those in the earlier group.

Saturday morning started out at the Lions Club facility in Happy Camp to hear Dave Mack talk about gold, how to find it, where to look for it, its properties, and mostly about how to follow a simple sampling plan in search of rich gold deposits. Since the majority of those who attended were new to the whole mining experience, this led to many questions during the talk. As always, Dave’s presentation held everyone captivated until it was time to break for lunch.

After lunch, we all headed out to K-15A. This is one of the Club’s (many) productive mining properties. We had already done really well out there few weeks ago on a project with over 100 people. So it seemed wise to return to the same location.

Working in the shadeOnce we arrived there, Dave and his experienced helpers divided everyone into four separate groups, each with their own team leader setting the pace. Then we all launched into a carefully-coordinated sampling program.

Dave really stresses that knowing how to gold pan well is essential to an accurate sampling program. Therefore, several experienced helpers were positioned by the river exclusively to teach and critique anyone who needed help with their panning technique. When the helpers felt comfortable that everyone had a good basic understanding and sufficient practice in panning, those people were plugged into the ongoing sampling program. Pretty soon, everyone was helping to move the sampling program along. With so many people helping, there was an overwhelming sense that we were going to find something really good.

Sample panBy sampling, I mean that the team leaders were comparing the results of pan tests that were being made in numerous small holes up and down the (very large) gravel bar. Seeing where the better results were coming from, they would then ask others to do more testing in those areas; and step-by-step, they were able to follow the traces of gold into high-grade gold deposits. This is a process which is very valuable to watch play out; because it gives you first-hand knowledge and increases your confidence that you can then go out and find high-grade gold deposits on your own.

Dave Mack and the New 49’ers are very lucky to have so many experienced members that are willing to participate in these weekend outings and show others how to prospect. There must have been at least a dozen helpers out there guiding the sample program along.

Because we had already done so well here, we started sampling in the same general areas that had been worked on the previous project. Once again, long-time member and experienced prospector, Craig Colt (known around the Club as “The Nose, because some say he can smell gold) almost immediately started bringing up good results out of one area. That particular location was also an excellent place to demonstrate for beginners what hard-pack streambed is, and how to see the difference between storm layers, loose material, sand and the tailings from earlier mining activity. As Dave Mack stressed during his talk, the main key in sampling for high-grade deposits is in knowing that most gold concentrates either on the top or the bottom of hard-packed layers of streambed. Here follows an explanation on video which was given out there by very experienced prospector, Dave Beatson, from New Zealand:

Feeding the high-bankerSeveral other areas were being sampled by the other team leaders and their crews also turned up good results. By late afternoon on Saturday, we were already setting up the high-bankers so they would be ready to go on Sunday morning. We like to end off out there by around 4 pm on Saturday afternoon. This allows everyone some time to clean up and pull something together for potluck on Saturday evening. Most of us walked away at the end of the first day with smiles, with some gold in our sniffer bottles from pan-testing, and plenty of excitement about what the next day would yield from the gold deposits we had found. Some people stayed behind to keep panning, perhaps until dark!

As always, our potluck gathering at the Lions Hall on Saturday evening was lots of fun for everyone, and there was plenty of great food.

Moving rocksSunday morning, I arrived out on K-15A at 8:15 am,

early I thought, only to find over half the group already there and working hard. Almost all of 100+ buckets were already full of pay-dirt and waiting to be loaded into the high-bankers – which were already running. Boy, were things in high gear!

Long time members, Rich & Connie Krimm, were supervising one team. Also, very experienced and long time member, Lee Kracher had a second team in full production. They were working a deposit of gold side-by-side. Their groups had actually started at 7:15 am on Sunday morning. WOW, talk about enthusiasm!!

Another long time member and very experienced miner, Ray Derrick’s team was also busy working the high-grade deposit which Craig and Dave Beatson had confirmed on Saturday. Here follows a video segment with Ray’s explanation of what they were doing:

Richard's high-banker

Otto Gaither’s team was also working the same gold deposit. Here is what Otto had to say:

Between all the discussion, laughter and some moans and groans, the buckets were filled (only half full to keep the weight down), carried and loaded into the high-bankers, and then carried back empty to be filled over and over again. The weather even co-operated by being a bit hazy and keeping the sun from parboiling us.

Luckily, one of the high-grade pay-streaks we were working was under the shade of a big tree. So that’s where nearly everyone congregated when it was time to sit down for a break.

When we stopped for lunch, we all had our first look at what all the morning’s effort had produced. Clean-up was only done on one of the high-banker scalpers. Wow, we were doing pretty good! Here follows a video sequence of team leader, Richard Krimm, cleaning out the scalper-section of his high-banker:

Guys with a high-banker

Seeing all that gold in the black gold pan was more than enough to overcome our aches and pains. Some people were already up and filling buckets again even before I finished my sandwich!

We like to end off out in the field at about 2:30 pm on Sunday afternoon. This allows us plenty of time to back-fill our excavations, put up the gear and get back into town where we can do a final clean-up of the gold and split the gold evenly amongst all the participants.

After the concentrates were removed from the high-bankers, they were carefully fed through a green “Le Trap” gold sluice to remove a large portion of the black iron sands.Oohs and Aahs could be heard throughout the group that was observing the process. The gold was looking really good, and anticipation was high for the final clean-up when we returned to town.

Craig Colt cleaning up the gold extractorOnce all the holes from the digs were filled in and the debris picked up and packed out, we headed back to Happy Camp where we would complete the final clean up and split. A “Gold Extractor” was set up in the shade at the Lions Club. The purpose of this device is to separate even more of the black iron sand from the gold. Afterwards, the final concentrates were dried, and the mixture of black sand and gold was poured into some clean-up screens. These screens separated the gold into 10, 12, 20, 30 & 40-mesh sizes, which then enabled the black sand to be blown away rather easily — leaving only the gold.

We ended up with a total weight of about one ounce, along with two very nice nuggets. This was then split up between the 54 people who had participated on Sunday’s dig. There were a lot of smiles and looks of satisfaction. A lot of these people had never even mined before. Now they were receiving their first golden reward. By the looks on their faces, it would not be their last.

Final gold separation Gold on white paper

Here follows a video sequence which captured the spirit of all the fun and excitement we share together on these weekend projects:

After hugs, exchanges of phone numbers, and promises to keep in touch, everyone headed on their way. Many people were talking about how much fun they had and how much they had learned over the weekend. There were several who said they would be back for the next weekend group mining project, as well.

Final clean-up gold

Note: These events are free to all New 49’er members. Please register in advance by contacting our office.


 

 

We just completed a fantastic week-long high-banking Group Mining Project on our Wingate claim, which is located downstream on the Klamath River about 10 miles from Happy Camp. We did last year’s surface mining project on the same claim, and recovered some really nice gold. Since we didn’t ever see any members return there to further develop the deposits we had discovered during last year’s Project, we decided to return there last week. This turned out to be a good move!

There were 18 of us involved with this most recent Project, including myself and my longtime, trusty assistant, Craig Colt. While there is some pretty good high-banking opportunity on the Highway 96 side, richer gold discoveries have been made on the very extensive area on the far side of the river. So we launched one of the Club’s large rubber rafts on the first day of this Project to go back over there and do some sampling. The raft was used all week to help ferry Project participants and all our gear across the river. We had excellent weather al week, bright blue skies and days which were not too hot out in the sun. We used to do these surface mining Projects (out of the water) during the (much) hotter month of August. Rescheduling them to June also turned out to be a good move.

As we had a fair number of participants in this Project, we decided to split into two teams on the first day. I went to a lower portion of this claim along with everyone who had vack-mining machines and those who were interested in digging out crevices on a (very) large area of exposed bedrock. Last year, we discovered that all of the cracks and traps along the exposed bedrock were producing consistent rewards in fine gold and small flakes. This type of mining is relatively easy to do; because it is mainly a matter of sitting yourself down and using a garden trowel or various other types of small digging tools to extract small amounts of gold-bearing pay-dirt (sand and gravel) from the exposed cracks and crannies along the exposed bedrock.

As always, we began with pan-sampling to make sure there was enough gold present to make all the effort worthwhile. There was! Our average sample pan was producing 4 or 5 small flakes and a spattering of finer-sized gold, sometimes 50 or more small pieces to the pan of material. It was good!

So it did not take us long to organize ourselves into a production team. Several participants were digging material out of the gold traps in the bedrock. Several others were following closely behind, using their vack machines to suck all of the remaining pay-dirt from the gold traps in the bedrock. The pay-dirt was carried in buckets over to several more participants that were screening everything into plastic washtubs. The screened material was then being fed into a Le’Trap plastic sluice that we modified to allow a water feed from a small motorized pump that was providing water from the river.

From long experience, we have found that the Le’Trap sluice recovers fine gold exceptionally well, providing the water flow through the box is adjusted correctly and the pay-dirt is screened through and 8-mech classifier before being fed into the sluice. We were seeing a nice showing of gold building up in the sluice as soon as we started feeding it! Everyone on my team was pretty excited!

Craig took the second team about an eighth of a mile further upriver where we had discovered a very rich section of high-grade streambed on the final day of our week-long surface mining Project last year. We were initially not sure if anyone had returned there after last year’s Project, because the whole area had been covered up by a thin layer of sand during a very large flood that happened in early January of this year. So Craig’s team got busy right away shoveling sand out of the way, trying to find where we had left off on our earlier Project, and to see if any of the original hard-packed streambed material was still present there. Last year, we were pulling nice big golden flakes out of that material, and sizable gold nuggets off the bedrock!

Through just a little sampling, Craig’s team quickly discovered that the hard-pack was still present right where we left off last year. We were amazed that nobody had returned there, since we did so well! This was a great area to develop further, because the natural contours of the bedrock create small pools of water, allowing us to set up a dredge nozzle to feed pay-dirt into the high-banker. The water from the pools is then re-circulated so that we can actually dredge hundreds of feet away from the active waterway.

Craig and his team did not waste any time getting started, and they were almost immediately rewarded with big flakes and a small treasure in small gold nuggets even before the end of the first day. When I went over to see how they were doing, Craig’s team was bubbling over with enthusiasm, joking with me about how I had made a big mistake agreeing to challenge them in a competition over which team would recover the most gold. While I did not admit it to them at the time; looking at their gold, I knew they were probably right!

Craig’s team started recovering beautiful nuggets right away!

As the guys on my team were feeling really good about all the gold they were recovering in their vack-mining program, we continued into the next two days working out exposed cracks and crevices in the exposed bedrock, while watching an ever-increasing amount of gold accumulate in the Le’Trap sluice. We were doing really well!

And while Craig’s team was recovering more gold and bigger pieces, with a lot less effort using a dredge-feed into the high-banker, both Craig and I were concerned that there might not be enough hard-packed streambed present to justify bringing my team over to his

location with a second high-banker. The problem was that we could not see the extent of Craig’s high-grade gold deposit, because the whole area was covered by a thin layer of sand. So Craig came up with a plan to move his high-banker some distance away from where they were already getting good gold, and do another test, to see if the high-grade gold deposit was large enough to bring on a second production team.

One of the biggest problems we continuously face as gold prospectors is that we cannot actually see the gold deposit, because the gold is almost always located down inside of hard-packed composites of sand and gravel. Since we cannot see the gold, we have to do sample tests to find where it is located.

It is always an incredible feeling of fortune when you discover something rich. The best way I can describe it is the feeling you might experience if you hit the bonanza when playing a slot machine and the money just keeps pouring out of the machine onto the floor. But finding a rich gold deposit is better, because you are recovering beautiful, natural gold; Mother Nature’s purest of treasures! The first realization of a rich gold discovery brings out an exhilarated enthusiasm from you that few other things in life can match.

Towards the end of the forth day, when we heard Craig’s team hooping and hollering from an eighth of a mile away, everyone on my team knew that we were finished with our vack mining program for the week. We could always return to that at another time. As much gold as we were recovering, it could not match the large number of beautiful nuggets that Craig’s team was finding in the other location. Craig’s new sample had paid off; the test hole they dredged for us turned up even higher-grade pay-dirt!

It did not take us long to set up a second high-banker on the fifth day of the project, and we were no longer two separate teams. There is a point on all of these Projects where everyone comes together as a unified group. Part of it comes from the hard work we do together. Part comes from the excitement of making a rich discovery. And part comes from the enthusiasm to work together so that we can recover as much gold as possible in the remaining time that we have. Once the team comes fully together, I usually find myself with little remaining to do as the Project manager. By this time, everyone already knows what needs to be done. There is a very worthwhile group chemistry that happens in these Projects, perhaps similar to what a competitive sports team feels when they are winning games against very challenging opponents. I always feel pride watching my team go at it, working together, laughing and feeling great about what we have accomplished together. Each Project develops its own unique chemistry; almost like something that comes alive. And I always feel a little sadness knowing that our partnership will soon end.

We were rewarded with rich clean-ups on both high-bankers at the end of our fifth day. Excitement levels were about as high as they can get!

  

The sixth day found us needing to roll a very large boulder out of our way. It was sitting directly in our path up on top of the hard-packed pay-dirt that we were mining. Besides being in our own way, we had a duty to move it so that it would not pose any danger to other members who might want to mine here after our Project was finished. So we rigged up a cable grip puller and hand-winched that big rock out of our way. We only needed to slide it a short distance.

Moving the rock turned out to be a really good move, because underneath it, we found original hard-packed streambed; something the original gold miners must have left behind under that boulder. The pay-dirt was so rich there, that we were actually seeing gold as we moved rocks out of the way!

We produced our richest clean-ups on the sixth and final day of production. Before leaving the area, we filled-in and reclaimed all of the area that we had mined, except for the working face of our excavation. It is important to leave the area looking like we were never even there. This is not a difficult thing to do. We generally do not fill-in the face of an ongoing excavation in rich pay-dirt until the end of a season. This way, it will be easy for other members to pick up right where we left off if you want to mine there this season. It looks like there is a lot more pay-dirt to be mined in that specific location. The Wingate claim is so extensive on the other side, we have hardly even begun to sample the larger area. There are years and years of work remaining down there.

We always devote the seventh day of these projects to pulling our gear off the river and cleaning up all the concentrates that we have accumulated for the week. It takes too much time to clean up the gold every day, so we just accumulate all the gold and concentrates in a single bucket until the end of the week. Friday afternoon found our whole team going through the whole clean-up process. As we do not use any chemicals, we process all of the week’s concentrates down to all of our gold with the use of a Gold Extractor. Then we dry the final product, classify it into different size fractions through a series of finishing screens, and carefully separate the gold. Everyone participates in this process.

In all, we recovered 64.5 pennyweights of gold (3 ¼ ounces). Of that, 26.3 pennyweights were classified as nuggets. The largest nugget for the week added up to 3.3 pennyweights. There were several other really nice pieces. Participants split 122 gold nuggets between themselves, along with all of the other gold recovered during the project. Our partnership in this adventure dissolved at dinnertime on Friday afternoon. We finished up with a great barbeque.

 

 
  

We recently completed a very productive week-long (dredging) Group Mining Project on our Kinsman Creek claim (K-7), which is located upstream on the Klamath River about 30 miles from Happy Camp. We had done an earlier Group Dredging Project on this same claim a few years ago and actually broke our gold production record there. So we felt pretty good about investing another week to develop more of the claim’s underwater gold deposits.

There were 24 of us involved with this most recent Project, including myself and my longtime, trusty assistants, Jake Urban and Jeff Butcher. Richard Dahlke was present to give us some help, and Otto Gaither has also been helping us out with this year’s week-long Projects, taking on the job of “??Shore boss” ?? which basically means keeping all of the gear running, team needs supplied and resolving most of the organizational challenges which come up along the way. Having a full-time “shore boss” on a Project allows me to spend more time working with participants to sample for high-grade pay-streaks.

From a long history of prospecting on this section of river, we already knew before this Project started that there is a rich line of gold nuggets, flakes and fines traveling down the far side of the river, and a strong line of fine gold traveling down along the highway-96 side of the river. Members have mined different high-grade and moderate-grade pay-streaks on K-7 over the years. Our basic plan for this Project was to dredge test holes between the areas where others had already established high-grade. We believed it was likely that we could discover more high-grade that had been overlooked by the earlier mining activity.

The main problem we were facing early in the week was that the Klamath River was still flowing abnormally high because of the record amounts of rain we had last winter. High (fast) water was making it nearly impossible for us to complete sample holes out in the middle of the river.

Our first day was devoted to setting up a base camp for the Project, and also launching 4 dredges and a small boat onto the river at K-7. I used the boat all week to ferry people, gear and supplies around to both sides of the river along the entire length of the claim. We set up a great camp in the shade right there on K-7 in large pull-off areas on both sides of Highway 96. This made it possible for most of the participants to visit before and after project hours. Otto and others organized some great potluck meals every evening throughout the week. It was a great camp!

On the morning of the second day, we split ourselves into 4 teams. On dredging Projects like this, we normally form up our initial teams based upon the relative experience levels of the people who are involved. Then, we direct each team to dredge test holes in a coordinated sampling program, taking on tasks which each team is comfortable in performing. The advanced team normally samples the more challenging areas (deeper or faster water). The least experienced group (usually consisting mostly of beginners with a team manager) samples in the less difficult areas (shallow, slow water). Those with moderate experience pull together in 1 or 2 teams to sample and dredge in those areas which require some skill, but are not too difficult for those who are involved. In this way, we are able to utilize all of the Project participants in a well-orchestrated sampling plan in search of high-grade gold. As the week evolves, we keep adjusting the teams so that everyone is given an opportunity to participate in a variety of ways according to their personal level of skill and competence. Several of the participants who began this week with no past dredging experience stayed with that same dredge all week. Others progressed to helping perform very productive dives on the advanced dredge before the week was over. Through some juggling around, we are always able to find a good place for everyone to contribute to the mining Project.

We place a lot of attention with the beginners during the first day or two of these Projects. The idea is to help them through the initial steps so that they can become more productive participants in the ongoing sampling and productive aspects of the bigger program. Beginners are graduated to more advanced work as the days go by and the sampling program evolves. All of the effort combines to a very effective mining program.

We were very lucky during this Project to have Jeff Butcher on board as the team leader of the beginner-dredge. Experienced dredger that he is, Jeff’s lifelong professional background is in firefighting and emergency services. He also has a bottomless depth of patience and understanding, while never losing track of the work that needs to be accomplished by his own team. So in addition to bringing his full team up to a level of competence within the first few days of the Project, Jeff’s team also discovered and began developing a moderate-grade gold deposit using a 5-inch dredge right on the first day! While some of Jeff’s people were graduating off to other dredges during the week, the remainder stayed there and contributed to a substantial part of the week’s gold recovery.

Richard Dahlke put a very productive team together consisting mostly of participants who had some amount of previous dredging experience. They dropped a 6-inch dredge down river to about mid-way on the claim; and again, managed to get into a moderately-rich pay-streak on the far side of the river. Through some trial and error, they quickly discovered that most of their gold was being recovered out of a gray hard-packed layer up off of the bedrock. So they quickly organized themselves into a production crew, and devoted most of the week trading off in shifts to contribute to the ever-increasing amount of gold that was adding up in our bucket.

Jake Urban also put a team of moderately-experienced participants together and launched a substantial sample out into the river from the high-way 96 side of the river. Jake is more of an aggressive, competitive team leader. He is happiest when his team is producing the most gold during a Project. So we directed Jake’s 6-inch dredge to an area where they were challenged with faster water conditions. The gold deposit they found there was richer than what the other two teams were mining, but it still was not the high-grade that I was hoping to find on this claim.

‘Jake Urban directing the activity of his team.”

Again, higher water levels were making it nearly impossible for us to push our sample holes out into the middle of the river where we anticipated that the highest-grade gold deposits were going to be. We were doing the best that we could under the circumstances.

The following video segment was edited together to show the process we were going through to develop these gold deposits:

We almost never begin these Group Mining Projects already knowing where the high-grade gold is located. We initially choose a mining property where we hope high-grade is going to be. Then we must find the high-grade through a well-coordinated sampling plan in which the whole group helps to accomplish. Difficult river conditions can sometimes prevent us from completing important samples which can help us trace down the high-grade deposits. This was the problem we were facing on about the 4th day of this particular project. We had to decide if we would just keep working the moderate pay-streaks to get as much gold as we could out of them, or if we would keep sampling for something better. This is

a tough decision that I am often faced with during these Projects. We always spend some quality time as a group in the mornings discussing the situation as it develops and debating various solutions.

“A-team smiles for the camera’

Our 4th dredge team on this Project was being managed by Rick LaRouque. Rick was joined by several other moderately-experienced dredgers. But these were some seriously motivated guys! They started referring to themselves as the ??”A-team’ from the very first day. Everyone in the Project agreed that’s exactly what they were! As the A-team was prepared to do just about anything to strike high-grade, we decided on the 5th day that the other 3 teams would continue to recover as much gold as possible from the moderate-grade gold deposits, while the A-team continued sampling for high-grade gold. So we floated their 5-inch dredge down towards the lower-end of K-7, not far from where other members were dredging high-grade just last year. I spent a lot of the 5th day working with the A-team. Time was running out! And while we kept picking up signs of the high-grade that we were looking for, high, fast water out in the middle of the river was preventing us from getting far enough out there to reach beyond where the earlier members had already mined.

Fortunately, the water release from the Irongate dam was reduced just in time, and the river dropped about a foot by late on the 5th day. This made a huge difference in the speed of the water out in the middle and allowed us to reach out into the river just far enough to strike high-grade before the 5th day was finished. The streambed material was shallow out there, so we were able to uncover enough bedrock to see gold scattered all over the place. That’s when we uncovered some very nice nuggets!

This following video segment was edited together from footage captured by our shore boss as we evolved through the sampling process of discovering the high-grade. It began with seeing just few flakes of gold. Through some trial and error, working closely together, we walked our way right into a rich pay-streak. It was incredible:

As hard as they worked for it, in all of the Group Projects I have been involved with, I am not sure I have ever seen a more excited group of miners. The A-team seriously wanted to dredge until it was too dark to see! No question, in just an hour or so, they had recovered more gold on their single 5-inch dredge, than all the combined gold recovered from the other 3 dredges for the entire day!

The thing about high-grade is that when you uncover it, the whole world changes to a much better place. Especially when you first discover it! I was fortunate to be down on that particular dive with Buzz Schwartz. The A-team had just reached bedrock on a sample in the middle of the river and said they thought they had seen some gold during the dive. Buzz and I went down to open up the hole and have a closer look. About 30 minutes into the dive, we uncovered a crack in the bedrock that was just loaded with golden treasure! Each time we expended the hole, we just kept uncovering more beautiful flakes and nuggets. Even underwater, I could hear Buzz yelling out his personal excitement.

Here follows a video segment which shows how excited the A-team was as we were looking at the gold that we had just recovered from the initial rich discovery:

‘Exhilaration” is the best word that I know of to describe the feeling that you experience when uncovering high-grade gold. I’m serious; I cannot think of very many things in this life that will prompt a more exhilarated feeling than what you experience when you uncover Mother Nature’s rich, virgin treasure! That’s also the way everyone felt in camp that night when we showed them what we had found!

‘Our A-team was carefully planning its next moves early on the morning of the 6th day.”

The 6th day of the Project found our whole company eager to get an early start on the river. The first thing we did was float Jake’s dredge and team downstream to fall-in alongside the A-team. It did not take very long for the teams to get both dredges into production. I personally devoted most of the rest of the day using the boat to ferry participants from the other 2 dredge teams, so each person on the Project had an opportunity to dive down and dredge up some of the high-grade gold deposit. The following video sequence goes a long way to demonstrate the action and excitement as it continued to unfold:

While all of this additional activity slowed everything down bit, I felt it was important to give everyone on the Project a chance to see what real high-grade gold looks like when you find it. Perhaps this was even a greater reward than getting a share of the gold. Because once you have actually seen high-grade gold, you will thereafter always know what you are looking for during sampling. It is one thing to hear or read about it. It is quite another to actually experience high-grade as it is being uncovered from the bottom of a waterway. Dredging high-grade gains you some personal certainty that Mother Nature’s rich natural golden treasures are right there for the taking. All you have to do is go out and find them. Finding high-grade once lends confidence that you can find it again.

As usual, there was very little I could do to participate in the last day of dredging out on the river. So I spent much of the day leaning back in the boat, watching with pride how all of the team participants enthusiastically worked together. They were pushing to recover as much gold as possible during the time remaining in our Project. They knew how to do everything without any further direction from me. Watching them discuss and work out a production plan together, once again, made me reflect upon how lucky I am to be part of these mining Projects.

Most of these people did not even know each other only 6 days before. Yet, here they were on the river working together as an experienced team of prospectors who had overcome all of the unknowns that we began with, worked their way together through some pretty difficult conditions, kept the faith throughout the whole process, and pulled off a wonderful success in the end. The transformation of group chemistry during these Projects into something really rewarding never ceases to amaze me! With that amazement always comes my own personal sadness that another fantastic partnership will soon end. Still, I am certain that meaningful friendships are sparked on these Projects that will last a lifetime.

The process requires too much time to clean-up the gold from multiple dredges each day. So we allow our final concentrates from each day to accumulate in a single bucket which remains in my care until the end of the Project. We devoted the 7th day to pulling most of our gear off the river and doing the final clean-up of the gold that we had accumulated during the week. As you will see from the following video segment, it was a lot of gold:

  

Everyone participates in the final clean-up steps, and every participant receives an equal share of the gold. In all, we recovered 120.2 pennyweights of gold. That’s about 6 ounces. There were 327 nuggets in all, which allowed everyone at least 14 nuggets.

There were a lot of smiling faces on Friday afternoon!

 

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