Gold Prospecting Labor Day Week

Well, it is almost time to go and spend some very quality time with friends for a fun filled week of prospecting before we close up camp until next May. We keep adding people to our group, and it looks to be a VERY enjoyable Labor Day weekend and week. Breakfast will be served to participants Saturday moring at camp and then all will depart on their particular prospecting adventures while the rest wait for those still coming in. We have FANTASTIC weather predicted until next Thursday, when we are supposed to get some rain, which should clear up in time for the next weekend. Will we ALL find gold. If everyone is searching for it we certainly will. We have a new person joining us this year from Oklahoma, and we have learning activities lined up for him that should give him plenty of stories to take. (Bryan and Brenda and the Boys are jealous) Several GPOC friends will be up to do some shoveling, highbanking, panning and eating. Several metal detectorists will be covering ground looking for nuggets and we may even get the dredge in the water. The NEWSLETTER will not be delivered the next two weeks due to time constraints for vacation and our VERY short week before the Denver Gem and Mineral Show. (We have two days before we must be at the show and work. Then there is the GPOC meeting in Colorado Springs to attend.) Hopefully all of you are going to be out finding gold this weekend, as well as bidding a fond farewell to summer until next year. That also ,eans new pictures will be on the website after the 15th, so watch for some great times recorded on film. For those of you who are wondering, gold closed today at $673.20 Good Prospecting to You.

Prospecting Labor Day Weekend

Prospecting the Arkansas River with friends


This past week went by triple fast! I was able to make connections with a wholesaler we saw in Tuscon that has a line of super gold nugget and gold in quartz jewelry. www.orocal.com (They are wholesalers only, but you can look at the catalog and e-mail me so I can gt a price for you) They also carry those figures and diaramas of miners and goldpanners. I picked up a VERY nice sampling of what they offer and we will be including it in the new catalog that we are working on now. Gold nuggets will also be offered as well as the corrugated mini sluice for black sand separation and Madam Queen Shirley's Magic Black Sand panning concentrates.

Labor Day weekend is upon us, and the summer has flown by at super sonic speed! We cannot believe our last week at camp will be here in 4 days and we have several prospecting buddies who we will be running around with picking up gold here, there, everywhere! NEW NEWS! Leadville has just recently put city wide WiFi in, so we have a second option for blogging and answering e-mail. Hopefully all of you are enjoying the DIY and panning tips form. We have a lot of scammers who are using it to find out if the e-mail address is valid and then sending us a TON of spam e-mail. HATE it. Really wish these people would get a real life. I hope I will not need to put the blocking html codes in, but it may come to that. WAY too many undeliverable requests are coming in.

The weather is shaping up nicely for this weekend, and hopefully all of next week as well. We will be looking at an old claim site as well as revisiting Cache Creek, Prospector #3, and some of our old haunts. Then will come the sad job of closing up camp for the winter and leaving the Arkansas valley soon until the next season begins again. We will have a few more days there at the end of September, but camp will not have running water available, and the sunroom will probably be packed away. But for now, the sun is warm and the gold awaits our finding it and taking it home with us. To golden adventures: CHEERS!

New Update on Point Bar Recreational and Gold Prospecting Area

GOOD NEWS! The BLM has successfully had the road to Point Bar repaired and have reopened it to traffic. They were able to get one of their best contractors up to the area Saturday, and the area reopened very quickly. Reports from the work area indicated that some of the holes left from last Thursday nights downpour were 20 feet deep. That's a lot of mud to wash into the Arkansas. You don't suppose that just downstream from that you might find a nice little pocket of GOLD, now, would you? Somebody ought to go and find out! 20 feet of classified material? I don't think we could move that much in a day with a dredge. Maybe a week, but not a day. That gold had to get classified somewhere downstream. The question is where. Don't think there is anything in that dirt? Well, then, you have never prospected at Point Bar. The upper benches can have larger and more gold than the river. What are you waiting for?! I just told you where to find gold in colorado.

HookedonGold additions

It is amazing how much you can get done in three days! The first attempt to rework the home page resulted in a home page that had to be deleted.....again! you will find HOME2 is the home page, now, and if I can figure out how to rename it without redoing it again, I will change it back. Three new pages have been added today that I have been working on the last couple of days, so you should have some new copy to read. At least one of the pages is a copy and paste from the old site. (Yes, I saved it all before I could no longer get in to change anything). Starting the catalog again is now at the top of the list, so stay tuned for that new page as well. PayPal will be my method of payment this time, and you should, hopefully,find the new catalog pages easier to navigate. The old one gave me no options for making it easier to use, and I am sure there were more problems with it than were reported. Hopefully, not 10 times as many. This is a long process, but we are here to stay, so time is on our side!

Still hearing of good gold coming out of Cache Creek, even though there is no water to work it with. Seems many are taking as many buckets as they can out of there and down to where there is public water to use.

How is blogger working for you as the blog page. I am finding it easy to use and don't seem to forget to log in and blog every few days. It has a nicer format, I think, than just blogging on a template page. Later this fall I will try to change website templates as the one I am using does not allow for many of the things I use to help with the expenses of the website. I love its' format, though, and it will be hard to be able to make it better, but there just is too much information that Adsense provides you to let that go.

The gold spot price right now is $656.50. Not bad for how low it went late last week.

Hooked on Gold's home page

Hey! Have you been wondering what happened to the HOME page here at Hooked on Gold? Well, I finally have time to devote some quality time to reworking the home page, and it has morfed into something really awful! To boot, the edit page is gorfed somehow and I can't get anything new to save. SO, in the mean time, you get to muddle through a mess while I try and figure out what went wrong. Gold has closed Friday up a bit at $656.30. This week should be interesting what with the Fed getting involved with the subprime stuff. Anywho, Watch this week while I try and fix the mess or find a template that works better. It I can do the latter, we will be looking at a format that will allow innerlinking better befroe we leave for Labor Day week and the closing of camp. Boy, did the summer go FAST!!!!! We had time to highbank, dredge, metal detect, and pan. We think we used almost every piece of mining and prospecting equipment we own.

New information of filing claims will show up this week on the website and some information on the blog as well. I have two weeks to get some serious work done. I amy even get the store back up.....if there is time! LOL! Good Prospecting to You.

Point Bar temporary closure

POINT BAR RECREATIONAL AND GOLD PROSPECTING AREA


ANNOUNCEMENT

Popular recreational and gold prospecting area near Salida, Colorado, Point Bar was temporarily closed today by the BLM due to heavy rains in the area that have washed out the road near the railroad tunnel. Several R.V.'s are trapped there, and the BLM has sent in emergency crews and equipment to fix the road long enough to get those folks out. More permanent repairs will be made at a later date.

Woody's claim, to the north of the bridge, will be used as a place for the stranded RV's to stay. Woody has generously allowed them to camp there as well as pan, sluice, fish and enjoy any of the other outdoor activities allowed in the area.

Also, the road at Badger Creek is under water at the sand bar, so passage in and out of the south end is also closed at the moment. Stay tuned and we will bring you the latest on the closure as information is available.

Gold is Down

ARASTRA near Alma, Colorado




Gold is taking a nose dive this morning along with the stock market. I haven't watched silver for a while, but I see it is also down at around $11.27, while gold is bouncing around $645. Everyone is saying the "Fed" should have given interest rates a nudge downward on the last meeting, and that stocks are reacting to the "misstep". I am sure gold prospecting, dredging, panning, and highbanking are going on somewhere while I am at home doing laundry and cleaning house. Believe me, I would rather have a #2 shovel in my hand than a vacuum cleaner! Climbing mountains looking for gold and gemstones is much more interesting that climbing stairs and putting away clothes and sheets. Painting is up there with mountain climbing, but only when I can't get away. We are looking forward to Labor Day week when we have our last big week of prospecting for this year, and must, once again, be content with weekend excursions to nearby places. GPOC has an outing planned for the weekend of Aug. 25th at Prospector #3. Don't know if we will make that as our last week will begin the next weekend and diesel and gas probably should be saved for that. You never know, though. We might decide at the last minute to skeedaddle. GPR has a demo this weekend at the Golden History Museum during the Arts Festival. Lots still going on, but I need a nap! LOL! Have fun out there finding gold.

Gold Panning Championships

Colorado State Gold Panning Champions: Center 1st place - Sue Drewes, Right 2nd place - Isaac Beaty, Left 3rd place - Patricia Vesterby.



Ah, home and rest! What a week. The Colorado State Gold Panning Championships went very well, with many new contestants, and many new winners. We had people from all over the U.S., and a great time was had by all. Many thanks to Breckenridge for being so generous in their efforts to make the championships happen each year the first weekend in August.

After the championships were over, we headed for camp and four days of semi rest and prospecting. We met up with friends from Oklahoma and spent several days dredging and prospecting. A very nice restful and enjoyable week. We did not have our grandsons this week, as we usually do, as the oldest one starts high school and had to be back home to register the 9th. We sure did miss them!!!!! The baby is now 5 months old, and after two days of wearing a GPOC tie, he actually tried to put it on over his head when we gave it to him. Adorable! Except for the projectile vomiting he produced the last morning we were in Breckenridge, he took to the outdoors and all the people like a duck to water.

Buena Vista's Gold Rush Days were very nice, with the GPOC troughs filled both days until the wind came up of Sunday afternoon so hard we were chasing t-shirts, and fliers, and magazines. Needless to say, we shut down about an hour early when it didn't stop. We were on the edge of a pretty big thundercloud to the south of us, that produced all the wind. The Cotin Tail gem and mineral show at the fairgrounds was well attended, but many complained that there was too much jewelry, petrified wood, rough for cutting, and not enough specimen material. We bought aquamarine, petrified dinosaur bone, and pieces that are formed when lightening hits sand. There is some very exciting news about one of the big claim owners on Mt. Antero who is looking to open an area of his claim for public searching. Hooked on Gold will be involved with this in a minor capacity and we will let you know about what is happening this next year. That should wrap up the report on this past week. Catch yo in the funny papers later.

P.S. There is scuttle in the markets that the selling of gold by some countries to deflate the price of gold is about to end. Watch for gold to spike when that happens.

End of the 2007 Colorado State Gold Panning Championships

August 6, 2007.

2007 Colorado State Gold Panning Championships are in the record books and posted on the GPOC Temp Pages, so go and have a look at this year’s winners. Pictures will be up as soon as we can get them transferred to the laptop. If we can do it with the equipment we have with us this week, it won’t be too long. If not, it will be next week. We are out in the wilds again this week looking for gold between the Championships and Gold Rush Days in Buena Vista. Man, holding the championships at 9,500 feet elevation takes its toll on everyone who works the championships and the troughs. We are lucky as we take the next week off and sleep all morning on Monday. Most of the group will to go to work on Monday after the long weekend. Kudos to all the volunteers who showed up, competed, and work the one to three days they were there. Thanks to the city of Breckenridge for helping us bring the championships to everyone each year. Without their generous donations of condos and gold for the public troughs it would be a lot more difficult to put on. We are gearing up to go out and challenge the gold gods to give up some more of their yellow treasure this week. With a day’s semi-rest, we should be up to hiking around for the search. We will keep you posted as to chat we find. Oh, in case I did not tell you the weight of the Cache Creek gold, it was 2.06 Grams out of the top carpet. We have not processed the bottom carpet yet; have to be home to do that, and we haven’t spent too much time there lately. Breckenridge has a lot of “open space” on the upper Swan and upper French Creek that we would like to find out if it is open to prospecting with small hand equipment. We haven’t found the right person to ask, yet, but we will continue to try to find out.

Gold Panning Championships and other musings

National/World Style Panning Competition 2006, Breckenridge, Colorado-Colorado State Gold Panning Championships


Gold is back at around $665 today. Minneapolis is in a tizzy today what with the collapse of a major bridge! WOW! Can you imagine riding that down to the river? Our condolences to all who were involved and their families. Fortunately, the number of people lost to this tragedy is not large, and could certainly have been a lot worse. What a mess.

Since the State Championships are this weekend and Gold Rush Days next weekend, we will be in B.V. for the week in between. Newsletter recipients can expect a newsletter next Friday, unless things get crazy. If so, I will que up a short version. Good luck to all who participate in the Gold Panning Championships this weekend! We are also looking forward to meeting folks at the troughs and teaching them the ins and outs of speed paning. Larry will have his highbanker combo cleaning up sand for the competitions.

Cache Creek, Panning Championships, and Gold Rush Days

Pack burro statue in Breckenridge, Co. by Robin Laws titled "Friends"


Wow! The Colorado Gold Panning championships in Breckenridge are coming up FAST! I am drying the Cache Creek gold so I can weigh it and tell you how much we found, along with a picture. Are you finding gold this summer? We have been finding gold with every piece of equipment we have used, and taught a thing or two as well. Next week will be another week in B.V. with new friends and old ones, too. We'll finally get to do some gem hunting in between the gold hunting. After the championships we will be with GPOC in Buena Vista for Gold Rush Days burro races and the Cotin Tail Gem show at the Fairgrounds. Summer is going by faster than usual, but the water levels are a little less. However, with all the rain we have had this year, they are still higher than normal. 4 days between weeks in the mountains has us hopping to get everything done and ready for the next week off. See you in Beckenridge this weekend!