Colorado -- Sluicing Cache Creek with Mike -- 6 May 2016

Hey Gold Adventurers...

I had the good fortune to meet up with Mike and hit Cache Creek for a day, yesterday. The goal was to pan, sluice and harvest some "wild" gold from the Cache Creek gravels...

We met at 9AM and the day started off a little cool, windy, cloudy and a bit drippy. Luckily, it cleared up a little by 11AM and most the day was partly sunny, nice prospecting weather.

Mike's pretty new to recreational gold prospecting, so we spent a while talking about prospecting, mining and such in general. We did some sample pans of material to practice that aspect before setting up our sluice, diggin' pails of material and sluicing.

Here's our Le Trap sluice setup:




Mike on Cache Creek:



After we panned enough to be proficient, we moved up the gulch to get some better material to sluice. A view of the dry gulch. I call it the "gift that keeps on giving".



We decided to work a section of hard gravels with layered black sand below the overburden and decomposing granite bedrock. Here's our chosen dig spot for the day:



Mike at our dig spot:



Mike runnin' the Le Trap sluice:



We stopped for a quick lunch about 12:30PM and enjoyed the day as the skies cleared, the snow-capped mountain views and all the bird life fluttering around us. A prospecting buddy Matt, from Leadville, was there too, working the gulch, sluicing material in his Le Trap sluice just above us. It was really nice to prospect all day with Matt. We talked about gold, prospecting, the weather, politics and about anything/everything that came to mind. We could see some fine gold in the top 3 riffles of both our sluices after a little while, so be both knew we weren't going home skunked.

Mike & I worked until about 4PM and decided it was time for a cleanup and see what gold we'd got and pack out. I demonstrated the Le Trap cleanup process to Mike, did a fast & dirty panning of our black sand cons and..........yep................some nice chunky Cache Creek gold for Mike. I put that gold in a vial for him and gave him the cons to re-pan later, more slowly & carefully back at home. We packed out ay 4:30PM, leaving the dry gulch & creek to Matt.

So, another great day on Cache Creek with prospecting friends......gettin' a little wild gold too.

Hope you get out soon, create a "Gold Adventures" memory too...............come back, post a Trip Report here on the Forum for all to read/enjoy.

Randy C-17A

Nice!!!! It's great you get to do what you love....nice report

Its all flooding here in Misery ! maybe in a week or so Ill get something going.

Well this week looks real wet again. We didn't have a lot of snow but Mommy Nature seem to be making up for that now.

Nice trip back to CC Randy. Your nose always seems to point you at the pay dirt.

Stay dry.

dickb