Brice Creek

[mathewjonz]

For any of you that didn't read my post earlier this week, I set out on a mission this Thursday. My only goal on this trip was to find one piece of gold larger than a BB. I planned on spending 3 or 4 days on the hunt but that was cut short for family matters and then even shorter on account of monsoon like rains . Jeffro suggested that I try out Brice Creek up above Cedar Creek Campground. I got up there in the late afternoon and found a patch of bedrock that had definitely not been worked this season. I only had a few hours that day and a couple in the morning before the relentless showers forced me to pack it up and head home. Now I didn't quite reach my goal of finding a nice picker, but overall, I'm pretty happy with what I found!

[vandal]

niice!

[Jeffro]

Brice usually doesn't have much in fines, you did good to find that much


Trick up there isn't to find the ground that hasn't been worked this season, it's to find ground that hasn't been worked at all. Once you find a decent patch that has never been worked, the pickers will come

[LUCKE1]

Nice gold, i love to see gold in the pan, yours or mine.. my wife took me to dole bar for fathers day weekend and i ran my highbanker for about 18 hrs total, and ended up coming home with 2 five gallon buckets about 3/4 full. im still working it through my clean up gear. i will also post some pics of what i end up with.

[mathewjonz]

Brice usually doesn't have much in fines, you did good to find that much


Trick up there isn't to find the ground that hasn't been worked this season, it's to find ground that hasn't been worked at all. Once you find a decent patch that has never been worked, the pickers will come

The area that I worked looked like it hadn't been touched in a while, I had to move some pretty hefty boulders to get to the spot I wanted to clean out and some of the little pockets in the bedrock had some nice rust streaks in them that led me to believe that it was some old ground. That being said, I think the lack of bigger gold was due to the fact that the bedrock ended up being pretty smoothed out instead of the nice rough texture that gold really likes to grab on to.

I had a great time and I worked through the unrelenting downpours of rain until I was too cold and miserable to go on any longer I plan on going back just as soon as I get a couple of days to myself, and continue the hunt. It's definitely not the easiest gold I've ever gotten, (lots of boulders) but the funny thing about me is I love a challenge Maybe this time I'll come a little more prepared to deal with the rain

[mathewjonz]

Nice gold, i love to see gold in the pan, yours or mine.. my wife took me to dole bar for fathers day weekend and i ran my highbanker for about 18 hrs total, and ended up coming home with 2 five gallon buckets about 3/4 full. im still working it through my clean up gear. i will also post some pics of what i end up with.

Can't wait to see your pics! I always do well on the South Umpqua. Gold seems to find it's way just about everywhere along the banks, most of it is just very fine in my experience. Even the larger flakes are very flat in comparison to what I found at Brice Creek. But it is way easier to work on the South Umpqua than it is at other places I have been to, I enjoy myself every time I go there

[paulywallnuts]

I have been up there a dozen times and i never found a spec. I did a bunch of panning never turned up anything. i took the metal detector down this past weekend for a few hours turned some pans. nothing. So i climbed up the hill about 75 foot and prospected, found a huge tree fell over with a a bunch of river rock in the roots. I waved the detector around and got some good hits unfortunately water is no where to be found close. so i took a sample hiked back down, the sample was full of black sand, but no gold. This is going to be the project for a few weeks. To high up on the hill to highbank. Even bringing a pry bar with me is going to be a challenge. Maybe zip line sand bags down the hill. Its going to be a work out. clay material so hard to dry wash. keep you posted

[mathewjonz]

I have been up there a dozen times and i never found a spec. I did a bunch of panning never turned up anything. i took the metal detector down this past weekend for a few hours turned some pans. nothing. So i climbed up the hill about 75 foot and prospected, found a huge tree fell over with a a bunch of river rock in the roots. I waved the detector around and got some good hits unfortunately water is no where to be found close. so i took a sample hiked back down, the sample was full of black sand, but no gold. This is going to be the project for a few weeks. To high up on the hill to highbank. Even bringing a pry bar with me is going to be a challenge. Maybe zip line sand bags down the hill. Its going to be a work out. clay material so hard to dry wash. keep you posted

Wow pauly! that is dedication lol, I'll be interested to hear how you did and what kind of system you came up with!

I did a lot of sampling before I found this spot, funny thing is, I walked right past it a couple of times. 10 feet up or down stream didn't produce anything in my pan. I started to get a little discouraged after sampling the area for quite a while and seeing all of the boulders I was going to have to contend with. I grabbed a bit of moss off a nearby rock and panned it out and actually found a few decent flakes in there, which gave me the necessary motivation to keep on trying. After about another hour or so of testing behind every big boulder I found and any patches of bedrock (which were mostly stripped and worked over already) I came across an average looking boulder and started poking around with my pan. On closer inspection I realized that it wasn't a boulder at all but bedrock poking up with a few cracks and crevices hidden under thick moss Every pan produced a few small colors from this area so I set to work.

My point is, it's up there it just takes a lot of patience, hard work and a little bit of dumb luck to find it

[goldnsands1]

Good job! Thanks for the post. We wanted to get out this past weekend and camp out on the Cow. Too much rain and low finances said to wait untill next weekend. Thanks again for the pict.

[Maddwarf]

I've learned alot on Brice creek. Never left there skunked, but has taken some poke-n-hope tactics. Found some gold stained red (from cinnabar perhaps?) and alllmost tossed it, but glad I didn't. Good place to gain river-reading experience. Nice pic.
Mad