The wife and I drove up to Jack-wade from Valdez around mid July. I was looking for you...Steve. Read your story before we headed up...so, figured you were in the area.
Good to hear you found something cuz I didn't. But, I was just playing around in the tailings, while the wife stayed in that BLM camp ground watching our stuff. As you know recreational folks are pretty limited to what we can use, so, I made 10 test pans over a couple miles for one tiny speck. There was group of fellas (5->6) working pretty hard across the river and up a bank. They knew something I didn't obviously. But they were humping buckets out and taking those back to their campsite. They were there we we drove in and still there when we left 3 days later. So, at $10 bucks a night to camp, for them it was a bargain. Nice folks were watching the place and the bathrooms real, real clean.
I'm thinking you probably up above; still you may have passed what looked like a materials pit along this 4 miles or so of that recreational area. So, I got this brilliant idea..well, at the time it seemed wise. I studied that pit and the material, to me, looked like it had been stacked-up with a conveyor. Of course that whole valley/gorge area is tailing piles from bank to bank...this material looked to possibly have been processed right from the ground it sat on, so,.....yeah, you guessed it; I rolled in with my ATV and little trailer and started bagging and filling buckets. Hey, the stuff was already classified to about -3/4. At 66 and out of shape I was pretty crapped-out when I gat back to camp. But, you should have seen this one guys mouth drop when I drove by with 5 buckets and a couple bags on the quad and my trailer heaped-up with bags. Tires were almost flat. And being by myself. I'm sure he's stillI wondering. But, at $10 bucks a day to camp and know other camping allowed along that stretch, I took it home. Anyway..
It had gold in it. Not much, though. We classified and panned down 3 bags real carefully for little to nothing. With that I decided to fire-up my new Keene and with this new-to-me Hog Matt for the rest. It'll be too imbarrassing to say what I recovered. Lol. The trip was kind of a scouting trip anyway because this one pardner couldn't break away. I hadn't been that way myself since back in '78 when I drove up to Dawson. Tailgate camping for the wife was, well, all new to her. It rained when we were there, hard. I didnt want to break out my detector in the rain. That road out of Chicken up to Jack Wade bothered her to. It is a narly thing. Made me nervouse and I've shot a couple Bears.
Just got myself signed over from the other forum, finally. Hope you made that drive safe and sound. That's a long one.
