Welcome once again to my gold prospecting adventures! For those that don't already know, I have gold fever. Which you can read more about here. And my favorite place to prospect is the East Fork of the San Gabriel River. And today I'm gonna be sharing about my last few trips up there. They weren't the best trips as far as finding gold, but like always I did find some. And regardless I just love being out there. Hanging out by the river with the Bighorn Sheep. On the first trip I headed up to my regular camp (my home away from home), up above the Iron Fork, and worked on digging around a big white boulder that sits on the inside bend of the river there. I had already dug out the lower side years ago and I had found a nice one gram nugget there. Floods had long since filled in that hole, but I knew where I had dug and so I got to work on digging the rest of it out. The digging was pretty difficult as there was a bunch of big boulders to deal with, but I put in the work and got a good start for digging out the upper side of the boulder. I only found a little bit of gold, but I think it will get better once I get back on it and get deeper on that upper side.

East Fork San Gabriel river

Snow capped mountain views from 4 mile

The Bridge to Nowhere

Hiking up into the Narrows

Natural springs in the Narrows

My camp

Digging around the big white boulder

Views from the hole

A bighorn sheep cruising past my camp

Breakfast

Digging for gold

Standing on the Bridge to Nowhere

When I was hiking out I stopped by "Big Boulder", as I often do, to chat with my buddy and fellow prospector Kenny. While hanging out with Kenny he invited me to join him and dig with him when I came back. Which I did. Kenny always seemed pretty optimistic and as we dug he was always saying how it was just one more boulder or just a little deeper and we'd be on the pay layer. Which never really happened, but we did find a little gold and I still really enjoyed getting to hang out with Kenny for a few weeks. Although next trip I'm planning to get back on my white boulder project. And unfortunately Kenny is kinda camera shy, so I didn't get a ton of pictures from those trips with him. But I did get some pretty cool Bighorn footage! They were out in numbers, at one point I saw 16 of them all together in one group. I really love watching them, they are such majestic animals. And if you are calm and still, they'll hardly even notice you're there watching them.