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   I had a trip scheduled to visit siblings in Portland, Oregon last summer.  During this drive I decided to take a small one day side trip to the confluence of Graves Creek as it drains into the Rouge River, just west of Grants Pass.   Being a favorite spot I have visited several times in the distant past, I wanted to see how it looked after a ten year absence.   The waterline in the river was fully expected to be high due to the late spring rains of that year.   Much to my surprise, water levels were low and access was very good.

   The river basin looked as if it had been very heavily dredged recently.   All the pockets of material seemed sorted and not mixed with other sized rocks and sands.   After gathering appropriate amounts of material here and there to conduct some sampling, I concluded the river bed was not giving up enough gold particles to make it worth my time setting up the sluice and run a production operation.

   I settled on taking samples up on the bank outside the normal high water mark.   This is an area that had experienced a catastrophic flood in 1964, in which the water level through this narrow canyon was much higher than its present state.   There is a bar of hard packed material found under a foot of loose overburden.   this hard packed layer runs about twenty to thirty inches thick set on top of bedrock.   I located a spot that someone had partially dug out and had begun a booming project (dredging above the water table by means of pumping water into the hole to be dredged), but for whatever means, had left it.

   The previous tenants of this spot went down into the hard pack.  However, they failed to complete what they started and missed hitting bedrock by only a few inches.   Much to my delight, this afforded me the opportunity to dig only a few inches down and scrape material off the bedrock.  The days bounty gave me two beautiful match head sized pickers and about 3/4 pennyweight of fines.  Not too bad for a days haul!  The best part of it all is, someone else did the majority of the digging for me.

   The lesson to be learned is if you come across an abandoned prospecting hole, do your best to see if they mean to come back to it, then check to see if anything can be done to further the project.   Your persistance may pleasantly surprise you with rewards reaped from someone's laziness.