While hanging with our pal Greg Mulac in Quartzsite for 2 months, we (okay, mostly me) were hit with the Gold Bug. I had always been interested in gold prospecting, so having Greg provide some professional advice on how to do so, I began to purchase a few tools of the trade. We found the perfect campground, the Ponderosa Resort, near the original 1849 California Gold Rush site. While camped by the river, we dug out our equipment and went to work in some of the coldest river water we have ever encountered. We set up our Gold Magic Spiral Wheel, and tried to get used to feeding material into it. The girls didn’t want to stand in the cold water, so I set it up in a tub on the bank of the river. We didn’t get any gold out of that first run, but we discovered how to get the angle set to extract black sand, which told us we were doing it correctly. The girls had fun looking through the larger rocks for exciting crystals and others things that caught their eye.
After running the Gold Magic wheel for a while, I decided to get serious and find a place to do some real prospecting. Anywhere along the river, it is possible to find a few flakes here and there. I wanted to try a technique I learned through several different avenues, one of which being the GPAA (Gold Prospectors Association of America), which we became members of during the Gold Show at Quartzsite. Using a few small tools, you dig the material that settles in cracks along boulders and bedrock. I began telling everyone I was digging in my crack, and the phrase stuck like glue. Laini decided to help me dig in my crack, but slowly became interested in digging in one of her own. We removed the material from the cracks, and then we panned it down to reveal the gold that had fallen in during floods. Gold, being 19 times heavier than water, immediately falls to the bottom of the crack and works its way through any other debris trapped there. The cracks concentrate gold in one area, so I chose to dig there and see what happened.
I will be adding several videos to the final post about the Ponderosa Prospecting, I don’t have good enough internet at our summer campground to add them here. Stay tuned for the final chapter, and to see just how much gold we found…
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