Ok, so I have a question, I spent about 5 hours time bucket dredging a nice out cropping of bedrock in the Bear river over the hoilday weekend and moved about 20 to 25 5 gallon buckets of material to only find minimal amounts of gold! My question is which part of the bedrock should I have been working, the front of the rock (which I did) or the back side of it? I really cleaned out the front and exposed a pretty good size of bedrock to include several cracks and a real nice crevice. Cleaned it out well and was disappointed and to top that off my wife found a really nice gravel layer sitting on top of some clay, needless to say she kicked my butt in gold! If there is anyone who can give me some tips on dredging in general that would be great.
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If there is a very large bolder in the way, what I like to do is work on the up-stream side of it. There is an impact zone at the leading edge. I will secure the boulder downstream with a cable, then create an upstream hole there and get the gold in this zone. Then when the hole starts to look dangerous, I winch the boulder into the hole. Now the best area for gold on the downstream side is more assessable and safer. You can get much deeper without the risk of the boulder flattening you. This works great for boulders that are too heavy for your equipment to move but just enough to roll once.
Mike
Read bedrock like a sluice box. Look for rough or low pressure zones and dig in. You were working impact zones. This is where the gold couldn't decide which way to go and dropped out. Impact zones around a boulders or obstacles will account for about 15% of the available gold. The only reason to work them is for safety (like is stated above) with a little gold bonus. Work the areas on the downstream side to find most of the gold. Just as your wife found out, it doesn't have to be a large boulder either. Any low pressure area will be good enough for gold to drop out and get caught. Gravel acts like riffles and clay acts like bedrock. Bam! she kicked you buttox. Another suggestion is your 20 to 25 buckets with a hand pump. I suggest you test pan more often. If you had you would have moved away from the lack of gold and found a sweeter spot. Live long and prospect
Mike
Hard to generalize, and different strokes for different folks and all that... but...
Try to think like a small sinker. Where would it go? I have best luck on the downside of a big rock down where it hits bottom. Scarry cause if you dredge out too much you could get crushed, but thats where the color often is !!
Cracks, crevases and the like are good too...