Hello TrinityBigfoot, I am guessing by the name you are in Trinity County. I am sure many people have been in the back country looking at old mines. I know I have for the last forty years or so. Where shall we start East or West, North or South? I have travelled the Trinity Alps detecting gold and sniping in the streams from the Tish Tang a Tang at Hoopa to the North Fork of Coffee Creek, from Canyon Creek over the ridges into the New River country. I have gone in on two day trips and have spent up to three weeks at a time in the Trinity high country. I have prospected the Grizzly, North Fork, China, East Branch, Cabin, Saloon Gulch, Whites Creek, Manzanita Creek, Nordheimer, Methodist, Plummer Creek and many unamed gullies and washes. I have sampled and found nice gold specimens in quartz on the Potatoe, the Mary Blaine country, Battle creek, Salmon Summit and down into the South Fork of the Salmon. I use to take breaks from the Trinity side and hike into the Marbles and the Salmon River Divide country, now called the Russian Wilderness Area. When I was a kid my summer vacation consisted of leaving out of Weaverville and walking into Oregon and back. I was with my uncles who were both old time miners. We would see a hundred different lakes coming and going. It was different back then, we did not have all these freeze dried meals like I take nowadays.The first night out we would camp at a meadow and cull out a weak looking deer and kill it. We would stay there for a few days till we had the meat ready to travel. We would add to the deer meat with wild onions, trout, miners cabbage, wild sweet potatoes, wild irish potatoes, and for dessert we usually had wild strawberries and blueberries. The only thing that we carried from the git go was coffee, my uncles had to have their coffee. We always came back with plenty of gold from those trips also, enough to buy me school clothes and keep them in beer all winter. Those were the days, and I sure would do it all over again if I could. My later trips sniping and detecting have never turned out to bad either. To get where the gold pays you are going to have to go shanksmare, all off trail for miles. Expect elevations gains and losses in the thousands of feet a day. It is nice to go in somewhere for a few days but it generally takes a bit longer than that to learn the country and find paying spots. Make it clear that I am not saying I got it all, but I have gotten my share over the years. Most of the watersheds are hit and miss. You may run into 100 yards of creek that pays very well and then you are back to prospecting again. Most of my time was in the water sniping with a mask and snorkle. It is fantastic to find a run of creek where the gold has never been removed. I expect that there are still a few places in Trinity like that. I guess I have rambled on enough, Keep us informed on your trips. I for one would like to hear about them. Thanks, TRINITYAU/RAYMILLS
