My brother in law was telling me that he always looks for small dams in in streams or narrow rivers. He travels around the world shooting for gold and the only time I have ever seen him want to run a sluice was at one of our prospecting sites in the Carpathian Mountains.
This was 3 years ago and my family and I, and some guys I work with and their families went over for our annual trip for some fun shared prospecting. My brother in law tagged along because he wanted to go shooting for nuggets; he had seen some of the nugget we got dredging and he figured since it is 3 days far off the beaten path and we had never seen signs of recent activity from people that there would be good gold.
We got on site and set up camp and then he took off for a few hour. He came back all excited telling us about some little 6 foot tall dam that he figured had to of been from the late 1800's. We all thought he was mad but figured that one of us should at least give it a shot because that is what he does for a living and we only do it as a hobby. So he took off with a couple guys on some four wheelers with trailers packed down.
6 days later they came back with 219 grams of fines, 77 grams of chunky and 133 grams of nuggets. They said that they put in a small dent but only really hit about 10% of the dam.
So that is what we have worked the following 2 years on our annual trip; we have 6 dredges going and have gotten about 75% of it done just within the first 4 feet of the dam down to bedrock.
The trouble we have every year when we return is that there must be some major flood every spring because half of the work we have done is washed back in with new gravels.
Last year we had a 7th dredge running on the down side of the dam and they where doing really well too, but mainly all fine stuff, but still a good amount.
One year we might actually get that area cleaned out all the way if we can get in something bigger than some 4 inch dredges with 6.5 HP pumps. But it is already a 3 day push over some very messed up terrain with four wheelers and trailers, our biggest slow down is that we all have young kids and are pretty much limited as to how hard and fast we can push our selves over that terrain, but I am sure that has saved us more ways than one too.
