My Winter on the Yuba, 1978-’79—First Gold!

Published January 20, 2008 by Jason

Jason Quinten Kincade’s Gold Fever Diary, Page 2—Outline:

My first opportunity to prospect for gold on the Yuba River during the harsh winter of 1978-’79 finally presents itself. I get lucky and discover a little pocket of placer gold, recover it with some simple tools, and pan it down to concentrates. The auspicious launch of my prospecting career concludes when I dry the concentrates and separate and weigh the gold).

For a significant percentage of my first months on the North Fork of the Yuba River (winter of ’78-’79) I was either rained out or snowed in, and I made the best of it. In fact, I enjoyed it almost as much as I did the nicer weather when I was able to hunt gold. I had brought along a box full of reading materials, all purchased at second hand bookstores.

It was a luxury to stretch-out to read in the back of my little Datsun station wagon, head resting on my fluffed pillow, warm and snug in my sleeping bag and soothed by the river’s rumbling, while outside cold gusts of wind howled and rocked the car while pelting rains beat against it.

Every now and then, I’d reach over with a rag and rub the fog off the window to check on conditions and glimpse the river rolling by. Sometimes when the weather let up for a few minuets, I’d rush out to heat coffee and cook a batch of popcorn then dash back to my cozy sanctuary before the next onslaught. I was having a great time and never wanted for much.

In those days, I still had lots to learn about prospecting for gold and recovery techniques. Yes, it’s true, gold mining had enchanted me since I was a little kid. But my only real knowledge , beyond what I had acquired from reading, had been obtained from a little hard-rock prospecting in the Mojave Desert in the late ‘60s, some prospecting in Arizona in the early to mid ’70s, and building and operating a sluice box while on a vacation in the Sierras with my family in ’76.

Sure, I knew how to crush hardrock to free and pan its “native” gold, how to use mercury to amalgamate “fines,” and nitric acid or heat to separate gold from amalgam. And yes, I was good at panning and running a sluice box, but that only scratched the surface of what I needed to know.

In a way, having so much to learn was a good thing, comparable to reading the first chapter in a long book, realizing it’s the best book you have ever read and, best of all, knowing you still had so much reading to do!

The first day that the weather allowed, I was up early and headed for the river with gold pan and digging tools in hand. Because there was dark clouds overhead, I knew developments could take a turn for the worse and chase me back to camp at any moment; breakfast could wait.

A derelict “diggings” (old placer mining property) was nearby on a small bluff above the river. The oldtimers had stacked rounded river rock in piles (called tailings) that were left scattered about the property when they mined it for gold decades past. There was not a sign of recent activity, nor was it marked as a valid claim. I decided to give it a look to see what might have been missed.

Walking through the diggings, I spotted a long depression in the decomposed granite bedrock that was visible between the tailings piles; it was ‘v’ shaped and sloping toward the river. The anomaly functioned as a tiny streambed and drained the west end of the workings.

After scooping some gravel from the bottom of the shallow “ditch,” I used the water that was running in it (from recent rains) to pan the gravel. And, sure enough, a few colors (specks of gold) shined in the pan amongst the “concentrates.” Concentrates are the heavy minerals (including gold) left in the pan after the panning process, commonly composed largely of hematite and magnetite (oxides of iron).

I continued to pan gravel as I made my way toward the river. Each pan showed modest colors. As the drainage neared the edge of the bluff, about 10 or 15 feet above the Yuba, the little channel deepened and dropped steeply to the river. At the bottom, along the rivers edge, the granite bedrock was worn flat and swept clean of overburden by recent high water. A narrow crevice, ten foot long and packed with gravel had been exposed, and all around it, swirls of heavy black sands (concentrates) had collected, thanks to the classifying action of recent high water.

Quickly, back to camp I went. I grabbed a whiskbroom, rock hammer, spoon, screwdriver and a coffee can. My intention was to clean out the crevice, sweep the bedrock, pan the material, and collect the concentrates.

It required a couple of hours to crack open the crevice, clean it and pan it all down to concentrates. It was easy to tell by the thousands of tiny yellow specks mixed with the black sands that there was a respectable quantity of gold, but how much, remained to be determined.

Back at camp again, I dried the concentrates over my Coleman stove and removed the magnetite (with a strong magnet). The volume of material had been quickly reduced by approximately 75%. This left the gold still mixed in with the remaining 25% of the concentrates—predominately hematite.

I separated the gold from the remaining concentrates, as the oldtimers sometimes did, by placing the material in a blow box (a simple rectangular, smooth bottomed “box,” open on one end) that allows a person to blow the sands (by mouth) away from the much heavier gold and out the open end of the box. With a little practice, one can become very proficient, but it’s practical only for small quantities of black sands. The material should always be blown into a receptacle, such as a gold pan, in case some gold is lost in the process.

When finished, I weighed the gold (all “fines”) on my balance scales. It amounted to slightly over 1/2 ounce troy. Wow! What an outstanding little crevice that was, and so close to a popular campground and one that had been visited all summer by recreational gold panner’s too!

Next: Of Camp Thieves and a Day in Downieville—Winter 1978-’79

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