After checking out the ghost town at Independence pass, Mike and I crossed the Continental Divide and dropped down into the Arkansas river valley. In the small town of Granite, CO we found and started up the dirt road that eventually lead us to our destination... Cache Creek! We drove all the way to the end of the road and found a spot to setup our camp not far from the parking area. On our first night we got snowed on and woke up to a beautiful winter scene. Luckily it was only about a half inch and most of it melted off on the first day. Mike and I got our prospecting gear together and started doing some test pans. From that we decided where we wanted to start digging. So we got the sluice box setup and got to work running buckets.
Camp after the snow
Snow covered tailings piles
Doing some test pans
Cache creek is not your average placer mining. The complex history there from the old time hydraulic miners, the BLM bringing in bulldozers, and more recent recreational mining makes it a bit more difficult than just reading your average river/stream. Luckily Mike has spent quite a bit of time at Cache creek and is familiar with a lot of the history. So that gave us a bit of an advantage. There were quite a few other miners working there. Some doing better than others. But almost all of them were good friendly people and we even made friends with some of them.
Running the sluice box
Gold
The hole
In the hole
More gold
We spent our days working hard, running countless buckets, and spent our evenings keeping warm around the campfire enjoying conversations (and shots of moonshine) with some the other miners. After that first snow the weather warmed up and everyday was beautiful. We had 5 fabulous days of digging and ended up with seven and a half grams of Cache Creek Colorado gold!!
Selfie with the bluest skies ever
Evening along Cache Creek
Mike snuffing gold out of the sluice
If you'd like to see more from our trip go checkout this playlist from Mike's Youtube channel.
And stay tuned for part 3 of our Colorado adventure coming soon!
all photos by @derekrichardson
https://www.californiamountainadventure.com
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