Well I'm here, and found a bit o' gold :) Options

[wambulance]

Hey folks, finally made it into town on 04/18/2008 but didn't get internet until just today 04-21.

In any case, we were driving around, sight seeing and such and were in the Blackhawk area but ended up around the Clear Creek park. There were several places to pull over but when we saw a few people prospecting we decided to stop and just have a look.

I walked down to the creek for a few photos and started looking at all of the pretty rocks that you just don't see in Texas around the bank (or at least, not in the quantity available here), when I noticed in the corner of my eye a very tiny speck of gold just sitting on the creek bed. I couldn't believe that there was gold just in plain sight, I expected to move tons of rock before anything became visible.

So anyway, the speck is in about 3 inches of water, and I had nothing to try and grab it with, so I just reached in and gently tried to remove it, and of course lost it.

My wife had the idea to bring a water bottle down just to scoop up some material so that we could work with it later. As she approached the bank, she noticed another couple of tiny specks of gold just sitting in the water. We scooped up just a bit of unclassified material and took it home.

Having no equipment, we were not prepared to separate the material, but just for fun we strained a bit of it through a cheesecloth, and after having done so could see about a dozen golden specks trapped in the cloth along with some darker material.

Needless to say, we were thrilled at our little find, especially as we weren't even looking for gold at that moment. It put the fire under me to go ahead and get some equipment and sign up for CP membership. Of course, these were things I was already planning on doing, I just did them sooner :)

Having paid a trip to Golden Detectors in Golden, I walked away with a Keene A51 sluice, shovel, 3 classifiers, snuffer bottle, 3 vials, gold pan, and a blue bowl. When I got home, I signed up for membership.

Anyway, we love Colorado already and are glad we made the decision to come here. We all look forward to meeting fellow prospectors here at CP.