Presidents Corner March 2019
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Mother Lode Goldhounds Newsletter for March 2019 Presidents Corner March 2019 Wow, another year of Important Dates 2019 expectations is here al- 03/08 Monthly Meeting ready. This year Resolu- 04/12 Monthly Meeting tion seems to be a bad 05/10 Monthly Meeting word, because they are easily broken. Making a 05/14-24 Bear River resolution to get out and 06/14 Monthly Meeting hunt for gold more often 07/12 Monthly Meeting sure sounds good, and 07/18—23 Roaring Camp maybe throw in a little more camping. The weather so 08/09 Monthly Meeting far this new year has been slowing down new adven- Ice Cream Social tures, but hopefully that will change soon. The water in 09/13 Monthly Meeting the creeks and rivers will rise offering new opportunities 10/11 Monthly Meetinfg to prospect. In areas where there is no water available except during the winter, should be investigated this 11/08 Monthly Meeting Spring. Dry creeks now have puddles available to pan, 12/13 Pot Luck, Ugly Sweater which has been a successful way of prospecting for In This Issue years... Get out and fight Cabin Fever and that mean old Gold Fever. No matter how much gold you find, Pg 1 Presidents Corner you'll feel better for getting out there. Remember it’s Pg 2 Meeting Notes not the having but the finding that makes it all worth- Pg 12 Pictures while. Pg. 14 Gold Hound Outings Pg. 15 Mother Lode Nuggets Going for that chilly gold, Pg 16 Tales From The Good Your El Presidente, Ole Days Mike Pg. 20 El Dorado Museum Outing Pictures Pg 26 Goldhound Classified Pg 29 Membership Application Meeting Notes February 2019 Mike called the meeting to order with the Pledge of Allegiance. He thanked everybody for coming and asked for any new visi- tors to stand and introduce themselves and say where they are from. We had 5 guests. Next Club Outing The next club outing is this coming Saturday, February 23th at the Placer Fair- grounds in Placerville at 10 am. Matt has already been out there and checked it out. You will be able to view magazines, maps, historical books, basically history of the Mother Lode area you won’t find anywhere else. We will meet at the fair- grounds in Placerville. Matt will give us a little tour first. He will help us go through the maps and books to help us find new places to go goldmining. Mike reminded us that the history of this area has a rich history of gold deposits. Newsletter If you don’t get the newsletter in your email, you can go by Pioneer and if you buy something, Heather will print it for you. Pioneer is located at 104 Placerville Drive in Auburn. Happy Valentines Day Before I forget, we have flowers and candy on the back table. Please help your- self. The candy is for the guys in the I love you wrappings and the flowers are for the ladies. I said to my wife, I can’t give guys I love you stuff, so she said, just tell them it is from me. Where to Look for Gold You will learn a about the size of the gold. If you are going out metal detecting, why go to the places where there was nothing but fine gold. There is a couple of chalk bluffs over by Reddog where there was lots of gold found. You will also find that they found 2-pound pockets of gold, but they were all fine gold. You can locate a few small nuggets and then take some of the material home and pan it. For the most part if you do a little research you will get better results. Reddog which is near Chalk Bluffs, has nuggets everywhere. I have been out there at Reddog… The problem with Reddog is that it is so close to town. A lot of people have been shooting out there doing target practice. You might find 10 bullets for every piece of gold. I think that can get frustrating. I’ve learned to ignore the loud signals, those are bullet type signals and to be patient and just listen for the smaller quiet signals. You will spend more time finding gold than digging bullets. Having learned that I might dig up 30 or 40 pieces of gold for every one bullet. Christmas Hill is not very good. I have been at Christmas Hill which is just down the hill from Reddog. It was a lot of sand, a lot of gravel, not many big boulders. There is gold there, but it is still pretty deep. Now you read in books where areas were purely hy- draulic, purely washed well Christmas Hill is a good example of that. When you first go into Christmas Hill there are huge deposits of bedrock where they have power lines going across the top. We were using Goldmaster which doesn’t have the interference problems like you would with a Minelab. With the Goldmaster we were finding gold all over the place 30 feet above the hydraulic area all along the power lines. It was just because it was shallow and the gold hadn’t been washed down. They put their power lines out there in solid bedrock. We did very well there. There is still a lot of gold to be found there. On a Minelab there is a cancel button that will cancel out the powerlines, but it also cancels out the gold, except maybe for a large nugget. I was walking along metal de- tecting and there was this zing and it sounded really good and I dug it up and it was 10 times bigger than I thought it was and I figured there was something wrong. I looked at my machine and I had bumped the cancel button which reduced my depth from 100% to 40% which also made my targets seem a lot smaller. If I had known, I probably wouldn’t have dug it up. Liberty Hill which is just down the road from there has a hydraulic pit that is 2.5 miles long and about a quarter mile wide. It is different than any place I’ve ever been too be- cause there is gold in the bedrock, gold on the side of the hill and there is gold above that on a ridge. What caught my attention when I first went there was the boulders up on the side of the bank. That told me that I should at least investigate and dig around the base of the big boulders. That area has never been worked. They left half those hillsides there to divert the water down through the hydraulic pit and out the back end. So they had to leave that stuff there. I started digging around the big boulders and the best day I had was a half-ounce. One time I got about a hundred nuggets under one boulder, but the total was only about 3.5 pwt. It was a lot of fun digging, every target was gold – no junk or trash. That’s one of the reasons I like digging. Anyone who goes out with me knows that the only person who likes digging more than I do is probably Greg and he is getting away from that lately. He is more of a chisel and hammer kind of guy now – chiseling out the bedrock. So, I move a lot of material. I can dig down 4 to 5 feet sometimes even 6 feet depending on where the bedrock is. It is kind of strange because the bedrock will be a kind of a peachy white color? Material and there is gold on top of that and you dig down a little father and it turns yellow and in some areas you have a blue clay layer. This will be the area where the gold accumu- lates. The miners hated these areas of clay it would gum up their sluice boxes. You know they have hundreds of feet of sluice boxes and they would shovel the clay and it would roll up in balls as it went down the sluice boxes and pick up all the clay and carry it out the back end. They decided that there was easi- er gold to be found. That is why modern miners should pay attention to those areas. I’m digging, I’m down 5 or 6 feet deep and this guy next to me is only down 2 feet and he is finding gold like crazy, so I kind of work my way toward him because it is easier if I don’t have to move as much dirt. It has been like that for 150 years. The miners would move to the easier areas. Yeah, they have been getting $3 of gold a day, but back home working on the farm they were only getting a $1.50 a day and if they were working for mom and dad they might have only gotten $.75 a day and it was really difficult work. So they come here and the guy down from them is making $45 to $60 a day so he would move further down. It’s not that they weren’t finding a lot of gold, it’s that they would go to where it was easier to dig and there was more gold to be found. It is the same today, you work and try to make it easy on yourself.