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Gold Camp Road, My prospecting journey (from day 1)
nate
post Nov 21 2015, 07:49 PM
Post #1


Shovel Buster!
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I've enjoyed reading some folks' posts of their adventures and figured I would document the start of my prospecting career. Hopefully some of you will enjoy the read, give me tips, and come join me as I hike out into the woods on an adventure. I live on the southwest side of Colorado Springs and have found that only about 15 minutes away is national forest land! Parts of gold camp road are on city park land, some go through private land, and still some adventure out into the great national forest! The first 2 are off-limits without permission, but as long as its not claimed all of what i have found in my first couple trips is open season for digging in NF Land.

Trip 1: My wife and I on tuesday 11/17/2015 went on my first trip to start my Gold Camp road journey. Im going to copy my post that i made after that trip from my thread "glen cove"

"My wife and I went up around gold camp road exploring today. The mountain actually wasnt too bad covered with snow, but it was still very windy. More specifically, we were trying to locate any old/new pegmatites around gold camp road. Not to dig, but just learning more about what to look for when it comes to pegs. Because of the weather, we didnt do any real exploring, but we did find the huge tunnel right where gold camp road meets, old stage road. Gold camp road is closed past there, but there is a huge tunnel (at least 20x20 feet and 150 feet long that appears to have been from an old pegmatite vein right where the roads meet. Im not sure what was mined there, but there are definitely remains of pegmatite heading into the walls and ceiling. It looks more recently to have only contained high schoolers sneaking away to drink bud light. Anyone familiar with the area around cheyenne mountain? Im super curious because that area is only about 30 minutes from where i live. Made for a great after-work adventure."

Trip 2: November 21, 2015
25 and sunny. Thats what the weather was when i started hiking. A warm november day......as long as you were in the sun. After looking at a few maps and checking in with a park ranger about digging, I started my hike up gold camp road from north cheyenne canon. I only had about 5 hours before I had to be home, but knew I could get a fair amount of exploring done. The ranger I talked to said that after 1/2 mile, I would be off of park land and be on national forest land, clear to dig. yippee!

About a mile in, the trail goes up and over an old tunnel originally used for the train that connected colorado springs and cripple creek. That is where I found my first piece of pegmatite. It was laying out on the far side of the tunnel a little bit off the old road. And it was a beauty! I cracked it in half and the mica that i saw inside had me thinking it was gorgeous little smokies for a minute. Very black and high luster. Close, but no cigar. I checked around to see if I could find a vein, but only found a large vein of white quartz right along the path by the tunnel.


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I decided to keep moving. After hiking out for about 45 minutes or an hour total and taking a turn to follow the creek, I decided to get a bit off-trail and start looking for possible dig sites. I sat down on the trail for a bit of a snack, and lo and behold, there sat another piece of peg! Its amazing what you can find when you just sit and look at the ground for a minute..... I decided to move uphill from this spot and try to find the source. I hiked on up a ravine for 5 or 10 minutes, taking my time to look around. About 100 yards up the ravine after having tried several other spots, I sat down facing a somewhat pegmatite looking rock. There was a vein that had some small quarts and mica pieces. Time to dig. The rather bad quality almost deterred me, but I was curious. You never know what just below that next layer. As i dug further in, the layers of brittle rock started to separate into more distinct layers. About 8-10 inches in, as i was still finding mica, the dirt changed from a dark brown(almost black) color to a more orange-brown. This kept my attention so I kept on prying back layers hoping for crystal. My hopes were high, but as i got into the new dirt layer in the rock the handle on my $4 pawn shop rock pick broke.....i knew i should have brought my new one, but i loved that classic looking beat up thing. Anyway, I used a stick to pull out all the dirt from within the rock layers I could to no avail. Nothing shiny. Even so, I enjoyed exploring and digging a bit. Realizing it was time for me to head back, I packed up my things and left while noting where my location was in case i want to explore further.


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Happy as a lark about having a half-day out in the mountains, I started my hike back down the road. As if i were a kid, i was kicking the sandy places and watching the patterns the sand made as it hit the snow. This put my eyes to the ground where a big hunk of quartz caught my eye. I traced uphill looking for the origin and there at the top of a bank was a big hole underneath a pine tree. Of course I just had to see what was up there, so I climbed on up. There hidden beneath that tree was a beautiful white vein of pegmatite! Some previous rockhound had dug out enough to reach his hand back about 5 or 6 feet. Hoping they left something for me, I rummaged through the rock that was laying about inside the hole and pulled off a few loose flakes. Thats when I saw it! GOLD mica. Of course my hopes wanted to tell me it was actual gold, but immediately I knew it was mica by the flakiness of it. First time seeing that outside of creek beds. Is it an indicator of anything specific? There was a 4-5 inch pocket of mostly the gold mica mixed with dirt. That was fun to find! Not wanting to cause further damage to the bank that is directly beside the road, I did what anyone would do and hiked up the hillside behind it. Of course some previous hounder had done the same thing! I found 3 or 4 spots where there was a bunch of white quartz dug up, but it appeared like there wasnt much on the surface in the way of a specimen to keep. Short on time, I headed back to the road to hike out.


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Now realizing I was making the rookie mistake of looking at the view down the canyon instead of up the hillside to look for any signs, I cast my eyes on the hillside and continued on. Only a couple hundred yards up the road I saw another hole in the bank! Again curious I walked up to it and looked inside the openingto gaze down a 30+ foot tunnel! The opening was just big enough to slide in on my belly, but once inside i could sit up straight. And what a sight it was! There was so much to take in that I hope I remember it all! Along the ceiling was a vein of red clay about 4 inches wide paralleled by a vein of golden yellow (distictly different) clay about an inch or 2 wide. If that wasnt cool enough, the right wall of this mini-tunnel was about 30% green! I dont mean it had been tarnished, I mean rock with a coloring of a certain microline feldspar ...amazonite! I think anyway....There were no hunks of crystals. Just a splash of it here and there in the rock. Who would have thought that my coolest find of the day would be while i was hiking out! Im hoping to find out more about that tunnel and not knowing its status, I left well enough alone. The tunnel seems long since abandoned other than the occasional litterer who thinks it would be fun to throw trash in some random hole in the ground. punks..... That tunnel left me with more questions that i can type. Who dug it? assuming it was manmade.....what were they digging?....is the pegmatite worth exploring? what about the red clay? the yellow clay? the green splotches that could be amazonite-ish? PLEEEEASE someone have some answers for me. If anyone would like to see it up close and personal, Id love to show you. Just message me. Its quite easy to find and not a long walk in. If i can find out anything from the rangers about that location and its dig-status, I fully plan to go do a bit of mining.....with my new pick in hand! I took pictures all along my journey to document what i was seeing and will post them shortly. Unfortunately my phone(camera) was dying and I didnt get too many in the tunnel.

What do you think of all i saw?

-Nate

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The Amazonite-looking rock splotches.
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nate
post Aug 9 2017, 09:15 PM
Post #2


Shovel Buster!
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Group: Members
Posts: 130
Joined: 24-October 15
From: Colorado Springs
Member No.: 121,949



I went out again on Monday to the same spot I dug the previous week. No pockets, but continued to find a lot of good signs. Lots of decomposing microcline close to the surface and more smoky faces than you could shake a stick at. Found 2 different openings that had muliple faces, but no terminations.

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Some fresh, never before seen faces with sort of a termination on the middle crystal.


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Large chunk of the microcline? Lots of this stuff. Think one face was about 6 inches long.


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The vein. That's a 4" by 3" cracked smoky face in the center with a large face of the microcline just to the right. 2/3 of the smoky cracked off with a big chunk I pulled previous to this picture.


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