After much dithering, including calls to Garrett and Jeff, we finally talked to Joe again. He wanted to help us out and is willing to rent us a brand new highbanker and a used pump so the expedition can continue as planned.
We hunted around Kalifornsky Beach for the elusive black sand, which is rumored to contain much gold. It turns out it really is elusive too. Mostly all we did was get wet in the rain! After talking to Joe, we learned that the black sand can come and go on a daily basis depending on what the tides are doing. There one day, gone the next! We may check back again, depending on how things go. We do have to go back and visit Joe after noon on Wednesday, with all of our pieces and parts so we can match everything up and create a complete setup.
We did finally remember to stop and pick up ammo for the new shotgun as well. That turned out to be slightly annoying. The guy at the Walmart gun counter couldn't get it through his head what we wanted. Sarah must have said "20 gauge" about six times, and yet still, he continued to ask. Finally got what we needed though (plus some oil for the truck) and got the heck out of there!
After our visit with Joe, we cheated and stopped at McDonald's. It just seemed like the thing to do on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. Then it was off to the Crescent Creek claim near Cooper Landing. Joe had made us a little map on the back of a piece of scratch paper to try to explain where he thought the best site to operate on the claim would be. We tromped around in the bushes for a while trying to locate "the spot". We clearly identified the old creek bed (which apparently shifted dramatically as a result of a flood in 1953 caused by an ice dam break), but never really found where the great place was supposed to be. We decided to set the sluice in the creek and work some existing holes near the creek. That worked out pretty well. Ken filled buckets of direct from the hole and lugged them to the creek, where Sarah ran them through the sluice. Then Ken filled up 4 buckets of dirt from the hole to take back to the house with us, along with our tiny amount of concentrate that was left from the sluice operation.
Once home, Ken started to setup the kitchen based panning operation while Sarah cooked up the halibut given to us by the friendly neighbors. She managed an annoying burn on her hand from the hot pan where she didn't get the pot holder on correctly. The fish was worth it though. Quite tasty! After dinner, Ken set about to pan through the concentrates so we can figure out if it's worth going back to Crescent Creek. We officially found our first gold in the kitchen!
If you look at the very bottom tip of the dirt streak in the pan, you'll see a sparkly piece of gold. You can also catch the sparkles of some very fine gold in the rest of the pan. It's really tiny though! It turns out it's really hard to convince the camera to focus on that one little piece of gold when there's so much lovely green to look at! It took about 6 tries before we got this one. The results of the concentrate panning have thus far been underwhelming, but we still have a lot more to go through.
Wednesday is still a bit up in the air. Looks like either fishing or concentrate panning in the morning (or both), followed by another trip to Joe's for the highbanker and the pump. Then either back to Crescent Creek or up to Colorado Creek depending on how the concentrate panning turns out. Or pans out! We do have one specific item on the agenda for Wednesday though: a trip to Bird Point or Hope to witness the bore tide at 7:08 PM. It's supposed to be one of the largest of the year and since we'll be so close, we might as well see it. That should be pretty cool and we'll try to take pictures and shoot video.
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