Article Written by Richard Bingham

There it is. Sitting in a gold pan. Just over 9 oz of the most beautiful chunks and nuggets ever made by Mother Nature. 97 nuggets. Anywhere from half oz on down. I wish I could say it was just lying there waiting for us. I wish I could say that we pried up a chunk of bedrock and there it was, all packed together looking like a cache someone planted for us. Well, I can say that because that’s just what happened. It was in an area of the Feather River which produced more gold in one pan than any other place on earth. It had coined the phrase “blanket claim”.  The name speaks for itself. Rich Bar.

Yes, we popped up a chunk of rock and it was there. The chunk of rock was under a ledge of sand, rock, and boulders, 20 feet deep. We arrived 10 days before. We had drove nonstop from Salt Lake City, past Reno 90 miles, into the heart of Gold Country. There, along the North Fork of the Feather River, was a cluster of cabins called Pine Aire resort. We knew Norm, the owner, who put us in a 2 bedroom cabin, with all the comforts of home. He just happened to own the Rich Bar claim.

For $40 a day you could dig and keep what you found.  We were already members of a mining club down the road called Golden Caribou and found gold there a few times in the past, so we stayed with Norm and planned on using our hi-banker at the Caribou claims. We decided to walk the river behind the cabins with our gold pans.

This is such a beautiful place. Everything green and water crystal clear. We walked down river a ways when we saw a man in a wetsuit and snorkel with a pan and a pry bar working underwater along the shoreline. John, my partner, called out, “Find anything?” He looked up and said,  “Just some little stuff.”

Anxious to see our first piece of the day, we hurried down to take a look. There in his pan were some little pieces with one round one that would make a nice earring stud. “Jeez, we worked all day for less than that!”  He smiled and said, “You must not be from around here. I live about a mile down the road and I always try to check a few places here and there every year. This place usually has more than this.”

Of course we were all over him asking questions about the history and where we could do the best with the short amount of time we had.  He said “Golden Caribou can be a great spot if you have the time to find the claims and prospect a likely spot, then haul in your equipment and work.”

That did seem to take up most of the trip. Pick a direction, then a claim, then find it, then hours of panning and walking and trying to figure out where to set up and work. As always there were no guarantees. Usually you found flakes and a picker or two, but for the time and effort it always seemed like a losing battle. As we were leaving he said, “If I had just a week and wanted to find gold, I would follow Norm down to his claim and pay the 40 bucks a day and work the Bed rock.”

Rich Bar is a place that has had hundreds of miners working every square inch for years, but they didn’t find it all. There’s people every year that find gold there. You have to be smart, lucky, and persistent. You can’t give up. We decided to spend some time at Rich Bar. That was the beginning.  

Next morning we were up before daylight and down to Norm’s claim. Along with us were 4 or 5 others from around the area and one that knew his way around the place. Rich Bar is a natural bend in the river that changed its course and left a half square mile of river bottom hi and dry. The bedrock is smooth with cracks and dips and swirls, all covered 20 feet deep with tons and tons of gravel and boulders the size of cars. There’s gold in the gravels and under the boulders, but the big stuff is deep in the bedrock. 

Norm would get the track hoe and pull back and expose a section of untouched ground.  He would drag back and haul off the top layer and leave the bedrock within a foot or two. It’s any one’s guess where to dig, so luck and gut feeling took over from there. We picked our spot and started moving the overburden. 

We set up our highbanker close to our diggings and started hauling bucket after bucket out and ran it all through. After hours of moving dirt and rocks, we finally had an area about 10 by 20 cleared off and already processed through the highbanker. We shut down and looked through the ripples packed with black sand and saw some color, but never saw anything big enough to pick out. We were finally on the bedrock and we knew that’s where the gold would be.

So the next day we started scraping and washing and prying up every little rock and pebble. Hours later we hauled up some buckets of the “good stuff” and ran it through the highbanker, then panned it down. Jeez, some flour and flakes, but nothing to get excited about. John and I were standing there kinda pondering what to do next when Kelly, a very experienced miner and vet of the area walked up and asked, “Are you guys through here?”

We didn’t find much, so I said, “Well, until Norm moves some more material back away with his track hoe, I guess we are.” Kelly walked over and borrowed a bucket of water and walked down to our spot that we cleaned and began pouring the water over the cleaned area. With everything wet and clean he pulled out some tweezers and proceeded to pic at the cracks that we washed so well. I swear in ten minutes he found 3 pickers, all half pennyweight or more and all sticking down deep with just the top edge showing. He found more than we did in 2 days!

He walked up and said, “You have a good spot, but you just didn’t get deep enough, and clean enough.” He walked us around and showed us a rusty seam in the bedrock, then took out a hammer and chisel and started busting it up from each side. In minutes he pulled out little Quartz pebbles, a blue clay, then just like that a little nugget.  “The 49rs got the stuff on top”, he said, “but the deep rusty seams still have the old gold”.

On day three we were there in our spot cleaning and scraping and pounding on bedrock and sure enough we were rewarded with a few more pieces and some nice flour gold. We were running out of space and digging under the steep wall of the overburden when we noticed things changed. The bedrock was on 2 levels. One on top of the other. It was a fold in the rock caused by earth movements. The rock dipped below another shelf and created a natural pocket. This had to be a gold grabber. Only problem was the twenty feet of rocks above. 

We knew we couldn’t do anything but wait for Norm to move it all back. Luckily, Norm was in a good mood and he moved back the wall the next day. We wasted no time and dug and moved rock after rock until 3 feet of the shelf was showing. Two feet thick and four feet wide and with a space less than 1 inch between it and the lower level.

We pulled out the hammers and chisels then pounded and cut the shelf out piece by piece.  Every piece we pulled out rewarded us with more gold. By the 5th day we were going nuts. The crack never seemed to end. It just kept going on and on. Instead of being vertical, it was horizontal with a slight dip down so the rock above kept getting thicker and thicker. Time was running out and we still hadn’t reached the end.

Well, there was only one thing to do. We called our jobs and gave them a story about car trouble. We said we would be a few days late and went back to looking for gold. By now we had run at least 50, maybe 100, buckets of dirt full to the top and moved truckloads of rock with nothing in the pan big enough to call a nugget. But we knew, well we hoped, that would change for the better. My back was telling me to go home. My partner had a problem with his hand. And between the cabin and the $40 a day to dig things had to change soon.    

We were dead tired and wondering if all this work was for nothing, when it happened. The shelf we were busting up for 4 days finally ended suddenly with the last chunk just falling off. It took both of us, plus a cable wench, to drag that last piece out. As we were pulling it out we heard someone scream. At first I thought someone broke a leg or saw a snake. It was a woman who was working next to us.

She saw it first. What we were dreaming of and working for. Looking down in the hole from her side she saw a tight pocket maybe ten inches long and one inch deep of gold. It reminded me of a gold chain. It had been packed in so tight it almost looked like one piece. Her scream stopped us dead in our tracks. There it was! Nugget upon nugget, with smaller pieces in between. It looked so beautiful.

What is so amazing is the fact that it’s the first time anyone has seen this gold. It was put there long before man was on earth. It was just waiting for someone to take the time and effort to find it. Thinking back, we almost walked away from all of this a few days before. We came close to packing it up and going home, but we stayed.

They say the difference between finding gold and not finding gold is a matter of inches, and luck. In modern days it’s also a matter of time and effort. I will add another. It’s a matter of how bad you want it.  If you want to be successful, you have to do what it takes. If it’s moving rock then move rock. If it’s sticking it out when your body says quit then you have to stick it out.

Good things can happen…good things do happen.

Article Written by Richard Bingham

(First published in Lost Treasure Magazine)

.

.

.

.