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Prospecting Trip Reports
Started by C-17A at 09-02-2008 5:44 PM. Topic has 0 replies.
  
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 09-02-2008, 5:44 PM
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C-17A
Joined on 01-30-2006
Posts 376
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![Stick out tongue [:P]](/forum/emoticons/emotion-4.gif)
Buchanan, Georgia -- Trip Report # 3
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Greetings GoldGrubbers,
Hey, had the chance to squeeze in one more day on the creek dredging in Northwest Georgia last Friday. This time I took my next door neighbor, who had been curious about my prospecting hobby. He'd seen my cons drying in the driveway and my dredge in the garage, and since he'd never done any prospecting, well.......time to hook one more person on the hobby!
We left at 0500L and got to the creek about 0745L after one quick gas stop. The weather promised to be clear and 96 degrees and humid. Luckily, we fould a way to carry all my equipment up stream and dredge in the hole I created my first trip up in July. Within 20 minutes, we were running and sucking stream bed gravels. I explained how a power dredge was WAY faster than a hand sluice or just hand panning. In minutes he saw exactly what I meant....
I showed him how to run a suction nozzel, tend the dredge box, clear rock jams, clean up the sluice box, prime a water pump, and generally "prospect". We took turns cleaning up and sucking up the stream bed every 1/2 hour or so.
We worked real hard for most of the day, making great progress digging into the creek bed and tearing up the bed rock around two big ridges that ran left to right across the stream bed, acting like large riffles. Yeah! There was a LOT of black sand and gravels around these ridges, and several areas of very jagged decomposing quartz outcroppings. If there was gold in this creek, I had to imagine it was in this stuff. We found some nice fine color again. :)
The sun got hot, but thankfully we were shaded most of the day because of the huge tree branches and the spot we had picked. The temps up at the Jeep were at least 10 to 15 degrees warmer in the sun than on the creek. Thankfully, the water was flowing clear and cool still, thanks to late season rains. Got to see hummingbirds sipping nectar from a lot of flowers nearby, enjoy the sound of the cows "mooing" above us on the high bank to the North, and watch a Redtailed Hawk hunt in the veggie field across from us. What a sweet day.
My neighbor was very fast to pick up on good dredging techniques and was very good at preventing rock jams and really digging hard into the soft, decomposing bed rock. I told him "the gold's all there....get it", and so he did! I showed him how to pan/sample our cons after a few clean ups and showed him the fine gold mixed in all that black sand. He was excited to actually see/find natural gold in the wild.
Last night I invited him over to hand pan some of our cons we had dredged together, and to sample some cons bags I had on stock to show the differences in aggregates from around the country. After just 1 hour, and some beers, he was really getting the "settle, wash, tap and recover" process down, and his snuffer bottle ended up with a nice selection of small gold. Sent him home with a 1/2 ounce vial with some bright, shiny gold flakes and fines in it to show his wife. We may just have another prospector in the ranks!
In summary, another very fun and rewarding outing.......had the requisite stiff and sore muscles that comes with 9 hrs of hard dredging the next day. What a great feeling. I just love this state for it's beauty and native gold! The bugs and heat/humidity, well.......we just agree to disagree :)
Happy panning and let's hear some of your recent trips out!
Randy a.k.a. "C-17A"
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Gold Grubbin' C... » Administrators » Prospecting Tri... » Buchanan, Georgia -- Trip Report # 3
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