Don't let this photo think it's spring time up here. These were sitting under a bridge, waiting for my second load from the car. I took a pic of today's adventure. I picked up a river sluice last week from a new store in Edmonton. With no place planned to really detect today, I thought that I would play with my new toy. It was cold, snowing, freezing, windy with a couple of pinholes in my chest waders which brought on a chill. I brought along the AT Gold with the sniper figuring I could work the creek, however that did not happen.
Here's what it was like away from under the bridge, down by the creek. The open areas were sporadic along the creek. I chose the closest one.
I set the sluice up in the creek and placed a rock on it to stabilize it.
Next came the digging part. Things were packed pretty hard amongst the rocks. I was classifying my material down to 1/2 ", using plastic Garrett classifier placed on top of the bucket. Some of the lighter sand like material came out of the creek in slightly frozen clumps but did break up nicely.
After screening slightly more then 1/2 of a 5 gallon bucket, I started feeding the sluice with my screened material. When I did my final cleanup at home, I went down 2 more sizes, until the material was about 1/8." I still need to pan my final material. I am pretty sure there is some flower gold in there, as a quick pan showed a couple of tiny flower gold pieces.
Here is the flower gold I got from the North Saskatchewan river over 20 years ago. It took me 2 1/2 summers to get about 1.7 Ounces. The creek I worked today runs into the North Saskatchewan River about 5 miles downstream. There should be flower gold all around the area, as previous creeks crossed and meandered around here thousands of years ago. I just hope I got some nice color today.
