Hooked on Gold Gazette 9/26/08

Cache Creek Fall Colors from 2007







· Gold Spot Closing Price for Friday: $877.80
· Spot price last Gazette: $871.80
________________

Calendar of Events
SEPTEMBER
· 1st - LABOR DAY
· 10th – GPOC General Meeting
· 12th – 14th Denver Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Show Panning Demo with GPOC
· 30th – Last Day for Motorized Equipment on the Arkansas River in Colorado
OCTOBER
· 1st – Arkansas River is now closed to motorized equipment until March 1st
· 8th – GPOC General Meeting
· 31st - Halloween
_______________________________________
NEWS

FALL is sure here, but we are having temperatures in the 80’s this week here in Denver. It looks to be dry and warm for the next week to 10 days. Since it will be nice weather, we are escaping for a day up to B.V. to finish up closing up camp and do some prospecting…….and picture taking. The Apsens should be in prime color.

Gold is showing positive this week with it reaching above $900 several times. Stock market isn’t sure what it thinks and the bailout……well…...your guess is as good as anyone’s in Congress. Oh, here’s an oldy but goody, “If con is the opposite of pro, what does that make congress the opposite of?” LOL! Are you ready for the debates tonight?

Get ready for the Arkansas River to close to motorized equipment for the winter early this next week on Oct. 1st. Cache Creek will be open until November 30th. Yeah, I know. The summer is over and we don’t have many days left to find gold with. I have a bunch of magazines and new books to catch up on and read, but not quite yet.

Wow! It seems like there isn’t much to write about. Remember when we had water so high on the Arkansas River in July that the rafters couldn’t get a raft under the bridge below the numbers? With B.V. already having had 5 inches of snow in September, we may be in for another winter with lots of snow. Then again, Mother Nature may throw us a curve and make it a mild winter. I haven’t had time to look and the sunspot activity reports lately to know what to expect. I’m sure I will be wearing my sweats and gloves to pan out cons whatever it does.

I’ll have pictures for you of what Cache Creek looks like after the trees were removed next week. I’m also anxious to see how much more dirt has been moved since the first of the month. Sounds like there was another incident up there right after we left. This time we know who it is and this person has been a problem in the past. Shouting matches and bad manners simply have no place in public. If you don’t like the rules, go somewhere else! We’ve worked d***** hard to keep what we have open for the public. We’d all appreciate it if some people would not do whatever they can to ruin it for the rest of us.

That’s it for this week. Remember to check out the new GPOC website at www.gpoc.com. Watch the blog this next week as I get more pictures and reports written about our September trip. Until then.

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley

Google has begun running third party ads and is requiring adsense sites to include information about this change on their websites. You can read about this on our Privacy Policy page.

World Open Panning website has this year’s world wide panning competitions listed and they add more all the time. A great site to visit: www.worldopenpanning.homestead.com . If the links do not work, copy and paste them into your browser.

If you find a broken link, please let us know
THE ARKANSAS RIVER is now opened TO MOTORIZED EQUIPMENT until October 1st.
_______________________________________
Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley Weilnau
www.hookedongold.com
www.hookedongold2.com Metal Detectors at Auction
info@hookedongold.com contact us
PLEASE BE ADVISED: Ads that you might find on this blog or on a website using ads, may use cookies or other tracking means to track your movements on the web. Please read our Privacy Policy to see how this affects you and what you might want to do to prevent cookies being used to track you.

Cache Creek-Signs to the Gold Area

Sign at the Parking Lot Entrance

Kiosk in Parking Lot

Signs at the Entrance to the Road and Then the Gate

Thought you might get a kick out of seeing the new signs up at Cache Creek. We will be back up this weekend to finish closing up camp, and we have friends up at Cache Creek that we will stop in and say “Hi” to, as well as get some pictures of the area and the trees that have been removed.

The Kiosk is too big for me to get all of the words big enough for you to read online, but I may get around to transcribing them into a word doc and publishing them for you later. Right now, we will make a few weekend trips to B.V. while the weather is still good and look at property for sale in town. Who knows what might turn up. It’s as good an excuse as any to get out of the city and we will probably do a little gold panning and metal detecting if the weather holds.

Gold is bouncing around this week, but has still managed to stay above $875. I am still hearing noises like it will make it to $1500 by the end of January. Speaking of gold, I just remembered that we finished cleaning up the cons from the September trip and the total was about 6 grams for 5 days. We did better last year when we could get to the layer at the creek level. When we uncovered it a few weeks ago, it was under water. BUMMER!

Watch for the newsletter tomorrow afternoon. Until then

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley Weilnau

BLM Tree Removal at Cache Creek

I had been busy downloading and resizing pictures this week so I can get a series of blogs up on what we did in September, when I remembered that the BLM, with the assistance of GPOC, is at Cache Creek today removing trees that are diseased along the side creek where all of the gold prospecting work has been going on recently. Removal of these trees will make the area safer to work in, as well as getting rid of trees that already have Aspen canker and pine beetle infestation.


The ridge above the area is already red and brown with the beetles that have burrowed into pine trees and left larva that eat the inside bark so the trees cannot get water or nutrients to the leaves. While we have been debating about whether to remove some trees from the area or not, Mother Nature has made the decision for us.


On a better note, however, when the gold prospectors are finished finding gold and we are in the reclaimation part of the site, we can replant the area with healthy trees, hopefully after the beetles have done their damage and flown off to “greener” pastures. Hopefully there are pictures that someone took today that I can share with you later. While we wanted to be there, the “j*o*b” said otherwise.


I have been fiddling with the Facebook page I started last December and have put some more information and pictures up. You can find it at facebook.com and look up my name, if you have an interest. Add me as a friend and let me know by e-mail that you are a prospecting friend. Some of the people who ask to be friends are not exactly “appropriate”, if ya know what I mean. It’s a fun way to communicate and get conversations and discussions going.

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley Weilnau

HookedonGold Gazette 9/19/08

Two of the Fabulous Gold Nuggets shown at the Denver Gem, Mineral and Fossil Show. WOW!

· Gold Spot Closing Price for Friday: $871.80
· Spot price last Gazette: $829.90
________________

Calendar of Events

SEPTEMBER
· 1st - LABOR DAY
· 10th – GPOC General Meeting
· 12th – 14th Denver Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Show Panning Demo with GPOC
· 30th – Last Day for Motorized Equipment on the Arkansas River in Colorado

OCTOBER
· 1st – Arkansas River is now closed to motorized equipment until March 1st
· 8th – GPOC General Meeting
· 31st - Halloween
_______________________________________
NEWS

Boy has a lot happened since my last Gazette! Gold spot price has been near $750 and back above $900. The DOW has been on a rollercoaster as well, and we now have nearly a trillion dollars loaned out to the financials who apparently can’t add and subtract even as well as you and I. In case you aren’t aware of what the 50 billion coming out of the Exchange Stabilization Fund is, it comes out of the U.S. gold reserves. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all wipe away our bad decision debts as easily as some of them have? Oh well, at least we all make enough to be able to bail out the institutions who lend US money.? AND pay their debt back along with our own.

Did you get a chance to see the fabulous gold specimens that were shown at the Denver Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Show last weekend? That big nugget shown in the picture at the top was at Colorado Nuggets and is around 116 ounces and came out of Colombia. Pretty impressive! The other picture is a piece of gold showed by Collectors Edge that looks like a pinecone. GREAT show and we were all VERY busy showing the public how to pan for gold with GPOC. Oh, by the way. GPOC’s website is now back up and running, and you can view it al www.gpoc.com That also means that our pages will come down soon that held the GPOC pages.

I wanted to take some time today to thank all of you who read my blog and visit my site regularly. I met a lot of you in the field this year, and was surprised by how many people out there already knew about the site. Last year about one in 10 people had heard about it, but this year it was closer to one in three! You are all a great bunch of people and I an honored to have you want to keep up with what is going on with Hooked on Gold. Hopefully we bring you some interesting news most weeks and keep you up to date with some of what goes on in the mining world. Thanks again, and may you find that big gold nugget somewhere in the world you explore. I always hear “Are ya rich yet?” and I have to say “yes, yes, we are”.

Kitco has had a run on silver coins this last week and has upped its’ bid or buyback amount on Silver Maples and Eagles. Gold and silver will continue to be a safe haven for some of your assets. Besides, they are just so darn purty to look at! I saw an article today about a coin store near me. They are having trouble keeping older rare gold or silver coins in stock and were urging anyone with gold coins to come in and sell them. Can’t imagine why you might do that right now, but if you’ve a mind to, you might want to go and see what your local coin dealer is offering to buy coins for. This store said they were paying a premium. Now, I’m not sure what that means, but I’m also pretty sure they have to make a profit, so maybe they aren’t giving what they are worth. What do you think? I haven’t checked out e-Bay recently, but you used to be able to sell them there at a pretty good price.

The Comex raised the margin price for gold today by a whopping 47%! They cited accelerating gold prices as the reason. Gold also rose AND fell the largest percentages in its’ history….all within a couple of days! The Bull is in the house, but I’m afraid I still think the Bear will stare him down. It ain’t over yet. Well that’s about all I got today. See you next week, and watch the blog for some more stories about our Sept. adventures.

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley
Google has begun running third party ads and is requiring adsense sites to include information about this change on their websites. You can read about this on our Privacy Policy page.

World Open Panning website has this year’s world wide panning competitions listed and they add more all the time. A great site to visit: www.worldopenpanning.homestead.com . If the links do not work, copy and paste them into your browser.
If you find a broken link, please let us know
THE ARKANSAS RIVER is now opened TO MOTORIZED EQUIPMENT until October 1st.
_______________________________________
Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley Weilnau
www.hookedongold.com
www.hookedongold2.com Metal Detectors at Auction
info@hookedongold.com contact us
PLEASE BE ADVISED: Ads that you might find on this blog or on a website using ads, may use cookies or other tracking means to track your movements on the web. Please read our Privacy Policy to see how this affects you and what you might want to do to prevent cookies being used to track you.

Gold surges upward

Denver Gem and Mineral Show has come and gone, and after 10 days of placer mining and metal detecting, one of packing everything up and getting things ready for the winter, and one to do laundry before spending four days in booths, I had to take a couple of days to catch up on SLEEP and rest. Today was a busy day for me and for my favorite metal GOLD. What with the financial markets tanking again today, there is a lot of fleeing into gold and silver, and gold is up over $100.00……TODAY! $886 as I write.

Christmas is coming in a few months, and while I know you aren’t ready to let go of summer yet, (first day of fall is Tuesday?) I wanted to remind you that we have lots of items for prospector gifts in our gold ‘n’ store, so pop on over and take a look. I have another gallery to put up of jewelry that has more on it than is showing right now, so come back in a day or so and see what else we have on hand. You can also order anything on the extended jewelry pages at about 40 % off the price that may be quoted on a page other than what we have in stock. I work with a company that has been in business for 42 years and takes great pride in their nugget, gold in white quartz, gold in black quartz and silver ore jewelry in 14 K gold or sterling silver. Lots to choose from. Mining scenes, too. Something for every prospector on your list starting at $5.00.

After Gold in the Colorado Mountains

Tossing Rocks for an Hour or so at Cache Creek so we had enough dirt to move. (That's Larry and Sam) Everyone keeps throwing rocks out onto unrun dirt. The walls can be steep with a ton of rock above your head. We saw holes dug in farther than a shovel is long and about as round as a small man can hunch over to scrap the back. PEOPLE THIS IS DANGEROUS. YOU ARE RISKING HAVING THESE ROCKS FALL IN ON YOU AND KILLING OR MAIMING YOU FOR A FEW GRAMS OF GOLD! Gold price is around $24.00 a gram right now and not worth a trip to the hospital.



Our final week in the field is over, and we are headed home. By the time I post this, we will be unloaded and resting before gong to bed in our king size bed in Arvada.


Our last day at Cache Creek was warm, dry and beautiful with aspens looking a little crisp, hinting at the gold color to come and more of those azure blue nearly cloudless skies. The colder weather stayed far to the east along the Front Range, and gave is some wonderful days in the September sunshine. What a week. We found about 3.5 grams of Cache Creek gold in our firsts with a little left in the cons after five days of highbanking. The metal detectors brought us a few more pieces of specimen grade gold, although the pieces were smaller than previously found. Still, worth the days of walking and digging.

We are tired, but still not looking forward to going back to the daily grind. April seems a long way off, and yet it is a mere 7 months away. The Denver Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Show starts tomorrow and the Arkansas River will close to motorized equipment at the end of September, only about 3 weeks from today. The holes at Cache Creek have advanced at an amazing rate, and anyone who was not there this year would be shocked at the amount of material moved this season. The BLM is planning on removing some of the trees on Sept. 25th, hopefully with help from GPOC. Thursday may be a difficult day for working stiffs to take a day off to move 50 or more trees, but they will try to have people there to help. We are out of days to take off, and so will not be joining in the work.

Thursday through Sunday will be work days for me at the Gem Show, and so this week’s newsletter will not be published. However, I will fill you in as I have time with blog postings and some pictures of Cache Creek and some of the holes dug there.

Gold spot price is DOWN today with the stronger dollar and lower price of oil. Its’ lowest point was at $748.70 and is now hovering around $750. Does this mean that gold prices will stay down or go lower? Well, in the short term they may fall some more, but in the long term, the dollar does not look like it will stay up, which will send gold prices back up. When? Who knows for sure. I DO know that bailing out Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae is a mistake that is going to cost you and me really BIG money, and that could help to make the dollar fall again. What do you suppose might happen if both of these giants go bankrupt even with the government bailout? Yeah, I know. Blame George Bush who has control of the Congress and the Federal Reserve. NOT!

Have a GREAT weekend. I’ll talk at you some more in a day or so….maybe four.

Good Prospecting to You,
MQS Shirley
http://www.hookedongold.com/
info@hookedongold.com

Cache Creek Gold in September

A Cache Creek Picker! Should have took the picture from the other side, 'cause that side was all yellow. Looks like some iron rock still attached, but still a nice gold nugget!

I see that gold is up a bit right now to $801, but still down from its' highs in July.

If any of you have thought that the fall might be a little less busy at Cache Creek, you would only be slightly correct. The parking lot has been full with gold seekers every day this week, although we have heard that there were fewer people there Labor Day weekend. Since the weekends have been so busy, a lot of folks have decided to come in to find their gold during the week instead. Us, too. Hmmm. We might need to change that.


I thought you might like to see this beauty that was found on Wednesday…….in our hole, but not by us. We invited a couple of new people to dig in our hole who had been sluicing for a day or two and hadn’t found much, so we told them to take some material from where we had been digging. We hate it when people don’t find gold! Not to worry. While the biggest piece of gold wasn’t in our ‘banker, we did come away with some real nice yellow colored metal.


The weather, by the way, has been some of the nicest we have had all summer, and the aspens and willows are being their annual seasonal change from green to golden yellow. It’s a little cool in the mornings, but sunny most of the time and pleasant. The only time it isn’t so nice is when old sol goes under and cloud and you are wet. If the wind is blowing some at the time, it can be down right bone chilling! However, pulling up a nice string in your pan helps to warm your heart and everyone around comes to see what you have found. I have to say, that there is STILL some very nice gold coming out of the area.


A cold front slid into Colorado last night, and so we are taking a day for rest and book shopping. Lucky you. You get a blog put up to read. Aren’t you special!? YES, you are to me. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t bother to think about taking these pictures to post and to talk to you today. Have a great one….I know I will.


Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley MQS
http://www.hookedongold.com/

P.S. The e-mail IS working again. I have had many requests coming in and even some dreaded “Spam”, too. Thanks for your requests and thanks for your questions, too.