I have been posting now for several months the on going work at our placer claim. Well today as I was browseing thru things I realized that it just might help a bit if I took you back a ways so as to see how our journey has came.

The 2004 season started out very well. Doc and I hooked and decided that between the 2 of use we could make 1 good man. He was finially feeling better after a bout with cancer and I had been thru 1 back surgery, 2 knee replacements and 2 bladder surgeries. If it wasn’t for walking sticks, I think we would have crawled alot.

Now up to this point all of Doc’s mining had been dry placer and all of mine had been hard rock. Well we met up in the super market one day and got to talking and decided to go out and give it a try and see if we could get a long. We woorked 3-4 different places to no avail. At this point Doc suggested we try the OK area. Now I had not been up that way since 1959 with my father. He knew of a group of people that were trying to make a go of the mine. Well Doc and I decided to give it a try, so off we go not knowing what kind of condition the road going up the side of the mountain would be in. The road wasn’t washed out but it was rough. It took 45 minutes to go 7ths of a mile. When we reached the top of the hill, the view was just beautiful

From there we went done to where Doc and Jim had been working back in 1995-96.

This is an overview of the valley in which we are working.

Doc and I started working the area in late Feb. and we did very well up til June when he left for Washington to visit the kids and grandkids. I continued to work the area until mid-August when the thunderstorms started.

We didn’t get back up til Oct. of 04 and the damage from the floods were terrible. As you can see from the pictures, we had a lot of digging to do. Between Oct. 04 and Jan.05 we had 4 major floods hit the Dale District. By the end Mar. it was just to dangerous to get up the road so we began looking for other places. The flood pictures reveal the damage done and we dug out 6 times in between.

In late Jan.06, I hooked up with a tractor operator who would repair the road and berm the wash so we would not get flooded out anymore. We rented the tractor for 4 days and to work we went. While working on the road I came across some prospectors who looked lost but of course wern’t because they had there maps. Well we all just clicked and I invited them up to the claims to metal detect there little hearts out, not know that the start of a far reaching friendship had begun. They have made several trips out just to help us remove overburden and to metal detect. We were all in camp one morning and I had just run 4 buckets of material and as the gold became visible it was obvious that this was no ordinary placer claim. We(Doc, the boys and I own 320 acres. We decided that if we were to get serious we needed to open up some area old and new and find out just what we have. The following pictures I hope will give you some idea what we are up against. They are in no order. My other 2 posts on the work that was done conbined with this one should give you a pretty good picture of the scope of our work.

I have included one picture that all of you should take heed of: Watch out for Bees.