Gold Basin, AZ

We traveled safely to St. George last week, just ahead of the wind and snow that covered Wyoming and Utah. We fueled up, got our supplies, then set out the next day for Gold Basin, a gold field south of Lake Meade by Las Vegas. We marveled at the new bridge going above the Hoover Dam – they were working on it as we passed by. Security at the dam required us to stop and an armed person (Homeland Security??) went into the camper and checked us out before allowing us to cross the dam.

We set up camp in the basin, which is 30 miles from the nearest town with a gas station – we were out in the middle of nowhere! I hiked to the top of one of the nearest mountains and saw this beautiful cactus garden, with the mountains on the western edge of the Grand Canyon as its backdrop. The desert is all dried up from summer’s heat, yet a few fall flowers persistently bloom despite the temperature extremes. As soon as we arrived, the winds picked up violently and the temperature dropped into the low 50s. I think we were on the fringe of the storm to the north, and we were cold! But after a few days it warmed up and the winds became normal again; now its in the low 80s with a nice cooling breeze. The critters have come out again, including this very scary Mohave Green rattlesnake and the male tarantula who paraded across the mat outside the camper! We let the snake live, although now we wished it wasn’t quite so close to the camper!

Ron came here for an outing with other metal detectorists he met online. It was fun to put names to faces, and some were experts in meteorite hunting. Some of the hot rocks Ron found actually turned out to be meteorites, remnants from a meteor that exploded through this valley. I was pretty busy this week too. I knitted a dish cloth from a new pattern, worked on a quilt, crocheted a new doily (just for kicks, to see if I could), hiked big mountains without getting lost, did a little metal detecting for gold to no avail, and experimented with my new toy, a recirculating sluice. Here’s a few pictures. Ron made the recirculating sluice for me. I walked up a promising wash and took 7 samples of dirt and panned each one out. Two of them had bigger gold flakes. So I went back and dug 5 buckets from those 2 areas, sifted out the rocks and then sent the dirt down the sluice into a bucket inside a big tub of water. It was amazing how much gold those 5 buckets had!

We also did a little exploring on the ATV and found this “lemonade stand” out in the middle of nowhere! Our theory is that it was the office to a mine. The sun set beautifully the other day, and ends our stay here. We are moving along to Laughlin tomorrow. We’ll keep you all posted!

Ghost Town Tour

Saturday Ron and I joined the Black Hills Gold Prospectors on a tour of Black Hills ghost towns. We all met at Stampers Black Hills Gold, where Ron posed by the giant miner (we thought he looked awful clean for being a miner - even had Harley Davidson decor on him!) We traveled northwest past Deerfield Reservoir to the sand caves. Turns out these caves were sand mines which was shipped east to glass manufacturers in the past. After a sack lunch I caught the butterfly on the tansy flower - posing just for me! We drove north along Castle Creek to the spot where Custer and his 1000 men and 300 cattle camped for a couple of days back in 1876. The valley was beautiful with all the yellow fall colors from the aspen trees. I even found bright red rose hips, which could be turned into jam if I had time! Then we moved north again past historic places where Custer and the Deadwood stage had presences in the past (Custer found a pile of elk antlers in the field which we passed) and went to the ghost town of Myersville, which only had 300 people at its height. It was the community that supported area gold mines. Wally was pushing the only remaining building over a bit with his one hand! The other remains was part of a gold processing plant - the roof was very rotted. The road back to the car was beautiful and Ron and I had our picture taken, and I took one of Ron - fall colors were exploding!

This last picture is Ron's most recent gold find. He bought a hearing enhancer for the metal detector and now is finding these tiny little gold nuggets with his big machine - quite an accomplishment! This was Ron's first nugget found in the Black Hills. He found another one last week. Hopefully he's on a roll and we'll find that $50,000 nugget in Arizona when we get there! I think the next time you hear from me we'll be in Arizona's gold country!