Our California Mother Lode Trip
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The first three pictures on this page are from Calaveritas Creek. We learned
a lot here too.
There was exposed jagged bedrock and I ended up with a small picker.
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It was very impressive to see the incredible effort the original miners exerted
to stack the rocks high up on the hill and out of their way.
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The small picker came from this hole.
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The picture above shows exposed bedrock on O'neil Creek.
Ken and I hiked down from the road. From that vantage point we could see that
it looked awesome.
However someone had gotten there before us and dredged this stream extensively.
We came away from here with about 40 specks of gold in our bottle.
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I'm not at liberty to say where we were in these next photos or
where the dirt came from to obtain most of our gold but it sure was exciting...
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It was the same as in other areas...here we only found small specks of gold
at first.
However we stuck with it and kept coming back to this spot because we believed
it had real potential.
And it did! The proof is in the pudding.
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It sure was fun to cleanup about every 2 hours and see the results.
Here Ken and Jerry Ann are carefully pulling pickers from the sluice carpet.
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We started out with very fine gold and it just kept getting bigger and bigger.
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When ken first saw this piece he said "now that's a nugget" because it was the biggest we had found to that point.
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The results for the week were 2/3 of an ounce. Half of that was in fine to
course gold and the other half was in nuggets.
The largest was the size of my thumbnail, about 1/8th inch thick, and weighs
4.2 grams.
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Needless to say we will return someday.
Hopefully everyone will now realize that not all of the gold was taken by
the 49ers.
We didn't get it all either. We ran out of time not material.
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Thanks sis for the fun time and excellent learning experience.
The gold was a pleasant added bonus.
(Pictures taken May 23-31, 2009)
(Page created June 4, 2009)