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Gettin’ High On Placer Diggin’s

(I have taken some liberties in enhancing some details of this adventure, but I have not exaggerated any of the facts about the gold.)

Sorry in advance to those of you into illegal substances, or those of you hardy enough to have actually smoked gold, or ground it finely enough to inject, or snort it, because this tale does not deal with banned chemicals or hallucinogenic substances. (Except I do think I have hallucinated while dreaming about gold in the past, that is, when the fever's bad.) However, the effects of this prospecting tale are nonetheless mind-altering, not without risk, and perhaps worthy of reflection.

One summer, when the snows had melted and the rivers had receded to make the trip possible, I headed up North to the gold fields. Up north means a sixteen hour drive (north and west) from my home. Why drive sixteen hours when there are other gold fields much closer? 

Well, far less people that’s why. In fact, where the pay dirt hides out there's less than thirty souls.
Furthermore, it’s true that some of the local boys dig test-pits dug right in their front yards (where they run little sluices and get good, coarse gold), because the yards around their cabins hold good pay!

But, I digress again, and as you'll see, I'm pretty good at digressing. 

So, on with the story. Anyway, less people is good, but the bugs? Bad! There are tens of millions of nasty blood-sucking bugs that fly!! You really can't hide or outrun them. In comparison, the bears are less of a concern, mainly because they can’t fly. (Wouldn't that be something? A flying Grizzly?!) But, because the bears are huge, smelly, and can be mighty cranky (sounds like a prospecting buddy I once had, or maybe he was saying that about me?), they deserve honorable mention and respect.

To return to my story, the gold field's location is in low mountains with lots of streams, thick northern boreal forests of pine and fir cover them, swamps abound, and mounds of glacial till are everywhere. Moreover, as some of the ancient glaciers were miles thick, when they melted they generated numerous rivers, so some placer pits contain seven or eight various stream deposits that intersect and overlap each other, thus the different stratigraphic levels. To complicate things, the glaciers wrecked the natural watercourses by dramatically changing the watershed's orientation, often stranding streams far above those of the present day, and that takes me to my story.

Picture this, I was sitting near the wash plant one day fixing a broken six-inch pump when I saw something across the river up on the opposite slope. A line of boulders and river rock ran along the side of the mountain. That line indicated an ancient riverbed perched atop the bedrock, about sixty feet above the modern-day stream. Clearly, sections of that high channel had sloughed off. So, I scanned the hillside with my binoculars to gather more information, and found that the channel rested on a bedrock rim, covered with eighty or so feet of boulder clay, further capped with thick forest. All at once, my pea-sized brain was hammered by a giant, golden brainwave . . . I must sample that channel! No argument or thought of personal safety holds me back if there's a shot at some gold! Fever fired my resolve.

I grabbed my five-gallon (20-liter) plastic pail, shovel, pry/digging bar, and a small sledge, items that all fit handily inside. Next, I shouldered into my prospecting backpack. (I keep all of my essentials in the backpack for easy transport. Nonetheless, when fully loaded, it weighs just a tad under a fully loaded B-52 bomber.) But rather than worry about gear in my backpack, I should have packed a back-up brain in it instead. It could have saved me a lot of trouble.

So, all packed up, I headed over to the river. Now, in Canada, even in mid-summer (which it was), the rivers that far north in B.C. NEVER get warm. In fact, if you dunk your head, you get an instant case of brain-freeze on steroids! Nevertheless, I had the clever idea I'd delicately pick my way across the stream in my rubber boots, hopping lightly from rock to rock, almost ballet-like. I danced across, losing more control with every step, until I put all my weight on a nice slippery cobble, and then prospector, pail, and pack plunged below the surface. (Any comments uttered after surfacing will be kept under publication ban to protect the innocent.)

Now that I was wet and cold, I enjoyed the rest of the crossing (which is a big lie). I felt somewhat refreshed (another lie) after dragging my cold, soggy carcass out of the water. On a brighter note, after dumping eighty or so pounds of ice water from each boot, it was way easier to walk, soggy socks aside.

Working my way up the bank, I hit a new obstacle. Boulder clay, the stuff I mentioned earlier, is a nasty mixture of tan to yellow clay and boulders the glaciers dumped wherever they wanted. It sloughs down hillsides when it's wet, then hardens into bomb-proof bunker concrete, though it's not quite as soft. Moreover, getting a toehold on that obnoxious stuff is the devil. Regardless, I cut steps into it with my shovel. Working a third of the distance upslope, I wound up in a wash filled with massive cobbles dropped from the channel and boulder clay above. The wash included a nest of ill-tempered branches and larger limbs as well. Regardless of my still squishy boots, I made it through while avoiding Mother Nature’s hazards and random obstacles. So, I continued upslope and worked my way into some pines. At that elevation, the smell of the pines is a wondrous thing; it's a smell I'll always associate with chasing the gold and the freedom to do so. 

At last, I hit the high placer diggin's and started to work. (A little description here: I must say it's tricky to perch one rubber boot on a three-inch ledge of bedrock, while the the other boot powers the shovel as everything is kept balanced, with the pick and bar manipulated to carve three feet into the face of the boulder clay, while uncovering the unpredictable contours of the bedrock rim.) 

My work exposed the top of the black slate rim at the bottom of that high channel. Pulling my sniping tools from my backpack, I cleaned every little crevice, pothole, and cranny in the slate. Then finding some promising oxidized dirt, I placed it in my bucket as well.
Being a long haul back down to the river, and as I had no desire to repeat it, I loaded that bucket as heavy as I could to make that one trip worth my time. So, with the bucket full, I gathered all my stuff and turned around. Instantly, I realized something shocking; that slope was a lot steeper now that I was facing a trip back down it! How the heck had I even got up there? Had an anti-gravity time warp transported me or something?

Well, we all know it wasn't any effect of anti-gravity or worm-hole travel, just caused by some moron that got himself into a place no sane person ever would. To get myself into such fixes, I somehow deny the laws of physics, probability, etc. so I believe I defeat them when I'm gold crazy. I carry on happily until I realize too late what I've done. However, one law never surrenders to my delusions, and that law, as we shall see, is the iron-bound law of gravity!

Well, I was faced with a problem. I had to go down, no option, because I couldn't go up a vertical wall of boulder clay no matter how high I was on the effects of prospecting. So, I took the first step down. (This in spite of my brain trying too late to warn me of something. Come to think of it, I often override my brain's warnings while chasing the gold.) 



The first step really wasn't that bad. I just leaned into the hill and put all of my weight on a squishy boot heel. Miraculously, it stuck, and the eight-thousand pound bucket of gravel and I took another step forward. (Could it be that the bucket was so heavy because of its high gold content? Or, was I just an idiot that had severely overloaded it?)

I kept at it, leaning and stepping, and soon found myself in the branches and cobbles that littered the gulch. I took several more steps but then a root or a branch snagged my boot. Well, that bucket just kicked out in front of me like it was rocket-boosted. Now, Sir Isaac Newton sure was right about gravity—his law grabbed me right then and there, all at about twice the speed of light.

Immediately my brain switched to salvation mode as I flung myself back as hard as I could, yanking the bucket towards me. 

However, the problem was, my feet no longer cared having already chosen to head down the mountain. My clumsy attempts at correction and salvation only magnified the effects of gravity by hurrying my feet on their way.

When viewed from the other side of the canyon, it must have looked as if someone had shot and wounded a strange forest creature up on my side of the slope: some ugly beast, a raging bull-moose perhaps, or other smelly, obnoxious critter (a classification I easily qualify for after spending three glorious weeks in the bush!). It probably looked as if some tortured victim, the last of its death-throes a hopeless attempt, was hurtling down the slope to certain and speedy destruction.

The real truth, however, is that instead of being out of control, I was magnificently in control--most supremely so in fact. In spite of my rubber boots throwing off more smoke than an Alaskan smudge fire, it was only my clever attempt to keep the bugs at bay, so I kept the smoke pouring from those hot boots while I then chose to find my brakes among the boulders. As a side note, the fact that the three spare gold pans in my backpack were absorbing more shock than a crash-test-dummy at mach-five was only a minor annoyance. Bashing off the face of the boulder clay was only a slight test of my prospecting mettle, so to speak.

At last, still breathing (though hot and ragged breaths those breaths were), I came to a sudden stop. Some friendly tree branches gracefully halted my ballet-like plunge. (It's rumored a Russian judge gave me a 9!)

Now, for those with a sense of the divine in nature, this was the perfect moment. The moment that finds the human at one with the mountain (and miraculously still alive). However, more remarkable than my survival was that none of the dirt had spilled from my bucket! Yes, that is the wonder in this high placer tale—not a stone was lost from the bucket, not a single grain of sand!

Nevertheless, somehow I rearranged my joints to make them work again, more or less; the pain was less than severe, more or less. However, with renewed confidence and something like desperation to make it back to camp alive, I was on my way once again. The only obstacle remaining was the sullen boulder clay.

At some point, you'd think the brain would revolt, refusing to power the major muscles in a descent like this after such a close call where the whole body has just faced imminent extinction at the hands of an idiot bent on sampling something so unfathomable as a bucket of dirt! But no, the brain can always be overridden! I've located the master switch to disarm it. I've used it many times, yet somehow I still live to tell this tale. (This is proof that life is full of mysteries, not easily solved by rational thought, or predictable theories.)

At any rate, about a dozen steps down, the clay remembered one of its admirable qualities, the slicker than greased Teflon one, and off I went again. This time it was only a playful smashing, with the odd bone-jarring bash thrown in for variety. It lasted for a mere twenty or so feet, then I came to a feather-like stop on the gravel below, the contents of the bucket still undisturbed.

Regardless, after I'd picked a pan full of golf ball-sized gravel out of my mouth, pushed several teeth back into their sockets, and replaced my left eyeball, I took a bit of time to check the bony protrusion between my shoulders to see what it was. Finding that it was my neck, and finding that it was still attached to my head, it was off to the river to pan the dirt!

Three flakes, in five gallons. . . . You can't make this stuff up!

I guess there's a lesson to be learned here, but far be it from me to get preachy, or to force my hard-earned wisdom on any of you. I'll let you figure out the drug-induced mysteries of this tale all on your own.

All the best,

Lanny