First Week-end Group Project Starts the Season off the Right Way!

By Dave McCracken

We launched our first week-end Group Mining Project this past week at K-11, about 20 miles upstream on the Klamath River from Happy Camp. The Project went really well, as we were able to return to a place where the high-banking was really good in the mid-1990's. But we were not able to return there since the big flood of 1997 buried it under a lot of sand. This year's flood in January washed most of that sand away.

The gold we found there this past weekend consisted mostly of sizable flakes. We recovered one gold nugget. Most of the gold was lying right on the surface of a brown hard-packed layer

As the Klamath River is still running abnormally high for this time of the year, we used one of the Club's large rubber rafts to ferry participants back and forth across. For those of you that receive the electronic version of this newsletter, the following video sequence captures our adventure from when we started on Sunday morning, through most of the final clean-up on Sunday afternoon. Check out the gold as we processed the final concentrates through the Gold Extractor:

Project, 10 June 06

There are a lot of visible places along the Klamath River where the large storm in January exposed streambeds in areas which have not previously been accessible to our hand-mining acivities. This opens up some excellent high-banking opportunities this season! Some of these areas are adjoining areas where we have done very well in the past. As just two examples, the following video segments show a newly-exposed area on the Seattle Creek Canyon Claim and another at the Schutts Gulch Claim.