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My Gold Prospecting Vacation
"Have fun and take pictures, okay?" That's my wife. I'm just finishing packing
up my car, a Land Rover. The chariot of the free-spirited, the stagecoach of the
21st century. Leaving had originally been my wife's idea. She's your typical
skydiving, fast driving, run-with-the-bulls adventurer, while I admit I am a
little more... discerning in what I consider exciting. It's not that I don't
want to get crazy, see the world and make memories that most people only dream
about, I just never have. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single
step, we decided together, and as I've been desperate to let loose my wanderlust
for some time, she simply asked me, "if you could go one place, do one thing,
all by yourself, what would it be? Which adventure would you choose?" That was
easy. I've long been infatuated with the Wild West mythos... cowboys and
Indians, frontier justice, panning for gold, making your fortune against all
odds. Maybe that's why it's been so tough to free my inner adventurer... it
feels like all the good adventures have already happened. Two seconds of
research changed that. "If you want it," my wife said, "it's yours." And she was
right: there's still gold in them thar hills, and there's nothing in my way.
Prospecting, just like the 49ers and gold barons of America's past.
Have fun and take pictures, she says. I smile as I get into the car. "I'm coming
back a millionaire."
After driving ten hours over a two day span, I arrived in what my research told
me was the best place to start. I wanted the real adventure, and this was no
man's land and true Old West country-- Yuma county, Arizona. I planned on
spending every night in the field; no hotels and running water for this
prospector! I had packed a one-man pup tent, a sleeping bag, a small gas-burning
stove, cans of food and some fresh root vegetables, clothes, and of course my
prospecting gear: a shovel and panning bowl, a sluicing trough and water bucket,
work gloves and heavy-duty rock pick, a magnifying glass, a flashlight, a pair
of non-magnetic tweezers, and a metal detector. Playing the part perfectly, I
followed my map into the mountains and desert until I found the village of Bouse.
I hopped into a small bar and casually sparked a conversation with the
bartender, eager to get some real first hand information. He initially raised
his brow at my Midwestern accent. "I'm here looking for gold," I confessed
matter-of-factly. He smiled at my honesty. "Let me mark your map for you," he
said as he explained where a few nearby mines were located. "Best of luck to
you."
I started by spending my first two nights at the feet of the White Tank
Mountains, west of Phoenix. There were several small mines scattered about, and
I quickly learned the value of a cool, moist cave as an escape from the patient
and searching Arizona sun. The mines yielded no lode, or "rock", gold, but I
didn't come to the White Tanks to find lodestone; I went for the river wash. The
waters in and around the caves were said to still over up placer, or "panning",
gold. In the first pan of silt I gathered up, I patiently swirled and swished,
hoping for that crimson-white glitter to stare back at me. A brief flash caught
my eye; I pulled my tweezers out of my pocket, fumbling so excitedly that they
landed with a splash in my pan. With some agitation I once again found that
glitter, and with the tweezers pulled out a single flake, dull and dark yellow
with flecks of brilliance peppered throughout. Gold! I had actually found gold!
I had pulled minerals from the earth by the sweat of my brow, just like the
miners whose adventures suddenly seemed so real! For two days I knelt, I sifted,
I flushed and I watched... and found that my initial success was less emblematic
of that pioneer experience than the frustration, exasperation and bruised ego
that followed it. It's hard to explain, but even though the White Tanks didn't
yield more than a few golden flakes, I couldn't help loving it. There was
something to the tactile sensation of holding the pan, crouching alone away from
the world, and finding value amidst chaos that was alluring and rewarding. I
wanted more.
I packed up my gear and made my way back to Bouse. Around Bouse were a few old
mines that the bartender said might still pack a little punch. As I was setting
up camp at the end of the third day, sundown was approaching, and from a nearby
cave I heard an eerie sound, an insistent and scratchy choir of screeches
echoing out into the dusk. In a flap and flutter, all of a sudden the earth
belched out a swirling flame of leathery wings, a mass of bats moving off into
the night to hunt. It was breathtaking, and I sat watching them until each one
disappeared from view. Beauty aside, I made sure all my tent flaps were securely
zippered before bedding down.
I spent the better part of a week with pick in hand, hacking away inside the
mines at the slightest reflection of my flashlight. And a different kind of
fools gold it was, for sure: in every mine, I found at least some stone embedded
with small but visible gold flakes-- there for the taking. Happy as a poet on
payday, I decided to spend four days gathering stones rather than processing
them. Processing was easy enough with the pan, and it didn't seem to matter:
everywhere I looked, there were gold flakes winking back at me. As my first week
drew to a close, I realized the error of my ways too late. The gold flakes
weren't embedded in clay, sediment, silt or rivers, nor were they nice, solid
lodestones. The gold flakes in this area were all confined to dark red rocks ("rhyolite",
the bartender would tell me the next day). It was too hard to pan, too stable to
sluice, and wouldn't let go of the gold no matter how small you smashed it.
Fool's gold it was indeed: perfectly valuable and perfectly worthless all at
once, only a fool would waste any more time on it.
The next day I headed into town, had myself a nice hot meal in condolence of my
lost efforts, and went north to Bill Williams River. I practiced my sluicing in
that area to positive results for three days. I developed a sixth sense for the
tumble of the gravel, the pace of the water, and the knack for shoveling good
silt. When taking a break, I tried my luck along the riverside with the metal
detector. I thought it was a secret boon, with how much noise it started barking
out immediately. With my shovel's help, I discovered that I was detecting not
gold, but the remnants of untold adventurers' past: a few old coins, bottle caps
(a couple from beverages I had never heard of), a belt buckle, two forks and a
knife, a cracked metal gold pan, even a mysteriously out of place railroad
spike. It was a museum of visitors I would never meet, and the intrigue they
represented forgave the frustration of the metal detector's uselessness to me. I
netted more flakes of gold, even one that was paper thin but about the size of
my thumbnail. I headed back to Bouse and to the bartender, to get more
suggestions for locations. I only had four days left, and one of them was for
travel, so I had to continue my adventure as soon as possible. The bartender
suggested I travel past Quartzite and cross the border into California. He
informed me that there were lots of old abandoned mining camps out there, and I
might as well try my luck there as anywhere else. I thanked him, and went on my
way.
A few miles south of Quartzite I got a hunch that if I could remember how to get
back, I should just find some dirt road and see where it led me. I did, and as
nightfall settled I came upon the eerie site of a long abandoned camp. With
wrecks from both wooden and metal sluices, and slightly more modern construction
on some buildings than others, it looked like the camp had had patrons for the
better part of 100 years, but the decay, silence and distance from anything
living suggested that Quartzite, and the world, had likely forgotten this place
decades ago. Excited, I promptly set up shop and hit the hay, eager for the next
morning.
The camp was every legend I loved come to decrepit life. In one of the buildings
there was a crude pulverizing machine, and a system of sluices attached to it.
In another building there rows of bunks, a couple with foot lockers still next
to them, with moldy mattresses and rickety frames half falling all over each
other. Another building, the roof buckling but not caving, seemed to be a mess
hall, with piles of old and broken hand tools clumped up in the corners. It was
a truly fascinating sight. I didn't dare go near the pulverizer itself, but I
didn't need to; there was a heaping mound of man-made gravel still awaiting the
sluice after fifty years. I found to my amazement that the well water still
pumped just fine, and I started filling my bucket and running the ancient
sluice. If I could have spent a year there, I would have. For three days I drank
in the history and mystery around me, concocting stories in my head about the
men who used to work, live and die here. I processed the gravel, and found why
they probably left; the gold was no longer plentiful enough to be worth mining.
I gathered perhaps a pinch of gold flakes while there. I will never forget that
place, and I hope someday to take my wife to there. But leave I had to, and it
was with a heavy heart and the thrill of discovery that I loaded up my car.
Later, I would find out that the gold I had found was worth maybe $40 total;
some of it had actually been copper. I didn't sell it. I put it in a small
plastic bag, and I take it out to look at it every once in a while. My wife and
I have gone of several trips together, and though when we first met I promised
her she'd sooner lobotomize me than get me in an airplane, we've done a couple
jumps together now. But every adventure I've had goes back to that first one.
Without that, none of it would have happened. I still remember the first thing
my wife said when I got home. "Are you a millionaire?"
"No," I smiled, "but I sure found what I was looking for."
Contributed
by Travis Van Meter