Dan and Leslie Look for Gold

A trip to North Carolina with Dan and Leslie to Look for Gold in 2008

On the day I drove to leslie and Dougs house it was 33 and cloudy and snowing at home, but were I was it was sunny and 74 PLUS the trees were showing some leaves already.

Although we spent one day at Golden Valley where we panned some buckets, we spent the remainder of the time here at Heather Grove finding real gold rather than -planted- gold
Heather Grove was a brothel and salon in the OLD days. The original owner made his money selling girls and booze to the miners that worked the two gold mines just down the road. As a result of this the property at Heather Grove has never been professionally mined and therefore tends to have more and easier gold that can be found as compared to the other sites in the area.

On the first day with an air temp of 47 to 52 and sunny skys we tried dredging. Since this was a rental unit they set it up for us and gave a quick lesson on what to do. This was a 2 1/2 inch dredge but that is more than enough for a beginer like me. Leslie made sure the top portion didn't clog and my job was to clear the hose and nozzle. The secret to dredging - the more dirt you move the more gold you find, and, the bigger the rocks the bigger the gold. The prospectors that find the most gold put some serious effort into this hobby. This was a lot more work than I thought it would be. The water was only about a foot deep when I started but I dredged it down to about four feet. I moved may rocks but Gold WAS found!
Even with the hard work I hope to do this again.

the first splash of water was a bit cold but I was working hard enough that I never really got cold after that.

This is few hours into the hole

As I dredged out the hole Leslie said I just slowly sank into the water until I disapeared. Going deeper is important as gold will settle and here the bed rock is some 25-30 feed below so the closer I can get to the bedrock the better the gold could be.

When we were done the owner, Mike, helped us to clean the sluice box. We could see some of the gold before we even started the clean up!

Next, we tried our luck at high banking. This picture shows one LOAD of dirt. It takes 2-3 hours to do a load.

This is Leslies chair. She could sit here while I brought her the dirt and she then spooned it into the sluice box. She had time to look around while doing this and was able to spot a 4 foot black snake and she discovered Minors Moon! (a weird tree formation that looked like someone was bending over and mooning you!)

I tried my hand at the sluice box also. This picture was early in the week before we knew how to set up the sluice properly. On one or two occasions we thought we saw gold in the sluice but it washed thru because we had to much water flowing thru at that time. We learned how to do it better as the week wore on.

This water was about 4-6 inches when I started. I got it down to about 3 feet. Unfortunatly this was about mid week and if we had any gold out of this hole it was most likely washed on thru. But, We did get some as we had improved our water flow by then but we still had lots to learn.

These next two pictures were from the last day when we had the water flowing correctly and we finally had a good day and found some good color!!!

Mike, the owner, got out his Fisher Gold Bug detector and found this piece of gold that was completely hidden in a piece of quartz. The gold couldn't even be seen until he broke the quartz apart to expose what you see.

On the last day of the trip Leslie and I went to the Gold Festival in Marion and entered a compitition hunt.
These are some of the treasures we got that day along with the gold we found during the week. I got my first 1 gram nugget and the next day I got my first 1 pennyweight nugget. Finding gold is fun.

The week wasn't all treasure hunting. There was time for swinging and watching the sun set and Leslie made some great dinners. She even made us some Dirty Rice!

We did manage to find at least ONE nugget!!!

All to soon it was time for the drive home