Howdy, howdy!
It really has taken us until Wednesday to recuperate from all the fun this weekend! But we’re back with another contest for you and pictures from Friday night’s premier party at the Hoffmans. Todd invited us, along with a 100 of their other closest friends – haha – to watch the Gold Rush Season 2 premier.
We had a blast, everyone was so darn nice and hospitable. It really was refreshing to know that they really are good, down-to-earth people. <— We were in no way coerced into saying that 
Here are a few photos that we took:
Remember leave a comment below with your best gold mining blooper.
Don’t have any bloopers?…. Then perhaps you’ll share your secrets!
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Hi Guys & Gals. Ok here’s mine. I call it my pooper not a blooper. I was working a 8″ dredge in Downieville Ca one summer with a good friend of mine and i was moving the over burden away from the front of the nozel about 9′ under water. The sun was just right and i spotted a good picker and with no place to put it but in my mouth next to my gum. I was always chewing and sipping water through the air nozel and happened to swallow it. And i new exactly what it was. So we took a break later and i told my buddy about it and he laughed his butt off. So he suggested that in the morning he’ll make up some cowboy coffee with breakfast and have me go sit on his 22″ gold screw. TRUE STORY ! Never the less i didn’t. So we always joked about it that summer of the nugget that got away. Roy Boy
one time i went with my buddy mining one day a few years back and we desided to do some highbankin we wereusing are 2 highbankers when i look at his sluice part and saw a nugget i yelled at him and when he went to grab it it went with the water we looked for 3 an a half hours turned out it wasnt gold
As a single father at the time, On a family gold prospecting trip, I was highbanking with my 3 young kids, and had “bribed” them with some friendly family competition and dinner out on the way home at their favorite burger joint, to get them to fill and dump as many buckets as they could into the grizzly.
Consequently they all three would yell out to me when they each would dump a bucket. Each because of their age had different fill levels of their buckets to make it fair and equitable. My youngest daughter who was 9 at the time was doing 1/4 fills of a 5 gallon bucket, and she was outdoing her other two siblings by a noticable amount. Being busy with my own buckets I was barely paying attention. It wasn’t until she dumped close to 25 buckets that I noticed how she was accomplishing such a task; she was getting her buckets filled for her at the end of the sluice. She is 18 now but we all joke about it still.
When a friend of mine Jim Chapman, (now deseased) and I were first going out to find gold we decided to go to Pershastin Creek in Washington to find gold for ourselves. The creek is well known for gold even being professonaly dredged in the past. Anyway we went to a specific spot where the sun setting slowly behind the mountains cast light across a bar in the creek that just absoulty shined with gold on the bank! We thought we were RICH! Using tweezers we picked up all the gold we could find along the gravel bar and collected several vials full noting it was kind of light but what the heck IT WAS GOLD! With dreams of how big the motorhomes we would buy we went home with delusions of grandure! We piled rocks at each end of the bar and left notes that this was our claim, claimed by us. Without knowledge of how to file a claim and much less knowledge of how to find gold we went home a couple of happy guys! Yep, you guessed it, we were picking up biotite mica! Sure looked like gold, we sure felt like idiots when we found out! Lots of good laughs later after some real diappointment we finally went on to find some real gold but not in that creek! We must remember, it’s not the gold, it’s the HUNT for the gold that gives us the most pleasure! May ya’ll have the golden crescent in you r pan! Jim
My preferred dredging location is 433 miles from home. I arrived just before sun up. I unloaded the motor from my trailer, strapped it on the wagon, and pulled it 1/4 miles down stream. I returned for the sluice box, some misc equipment, and pulled the wagon 1/4 miles down stream again. The pontoons were the next trip. Then the last trip was the footvalve, hoses, jetflair, and the rest of the misc equipment. After assembling the 4 inch dredge I couldn’t find the cap for the footvalve filler pipe. You can’t run the dredge without the cap. So I made another trip to the trailer. It wasn’t there. I walked back along the route to check every square inch of the creek bed. I didn’t find it.Then another trip back to the trailer to check one more time. Still no cap. I walked back to the dredge and took it apart and started hauling it back to the trailer. After 4 more trips it was loaded in the trailer. When I got home I found the cap laying on the garage floor. A 10 hour drive, 4 miles of pulling a loaded wagon, 1 more mile of hiking the creek and another 10 hour drive home makes for a long day. All that just to try to find a couple grams of gold.