 As we made our way up the steep unpaved road to Phoenix Gold Mine in Idaho
Springs, CO Dad and I were skeptical. It
didn’t look like a top-notch outfit, but we had driven almost an hour to pan
for gold and we weren’t leaving until we had tried it. I’m not talking about the kind of thing you
see at tourist places with the little trough full of water where you buy a bag
of rocks, dump them into a strainer and see what you get. I’m talking about a stream running down the
side of a mountain known to have gold deposits in it. Real panning.
This is how the early miners knew where to dig back when the gold rush started. They would pan the streams coming off the different peaks. If they found gold
nuggets in the stream, there was probably more gold inside the mountain. We had come to find the mother load.
We made our way to the stream first and met the old miner
who gave us our pans and a quick lesson and then we got started. I swear he must have been 150 years old. Here’s what he said: When panning, you should stay in the still
water, not the water with a lot of current.
Sit, don’t squat. Use your pan
like a shovel. Dig up a bit of sand and
rock from the bottom. Swish it around
the pan. There are several methods…you
can “drive” the pan, like a steering wheel, or you can slosh the water around
in a circle, or you can use your fingers and pick through what you’ve scooped
up. Whatever works for you. If there’s gold in your pan, it will be very
bright and shiny. Simple enough. However, during 30 minutes of panning we
found nothing but pretty rocks. No gold.
Not even a flake.
After panning we toured the actual gold mine. This particular vein was discovered in 1871
and there is still a large amount of gold, silver and copper in the
mine. We followed the vein from where it was only a
few inches wide near the entrance, through the tunnels, to where it was nearly
6 feet wide where the processing had taken place. Recently another vein has been
discovered. Unfortunately, it’s
difficult to get to and costly to process and the current owner hasn’t mined it
fully yet. I guess it would be worth
it. All of the mine’s previous owners have
been wealthy.
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