I am new to idaho, Caldwell to be specific and I am starting this to keep track of my ventures, and failures lol. Comments pointers and criticism is welcome
I see you're in Caldwell. A very central location. The Payette has many miles open with some decent gold.Almost the entire Snake is open with plenty of superfine gold. South is Silver City area .East Idaho City . Gold all over. Good Luck
Well I am from Bakersfield lol I plan on starting out between the snake and middle fork Boise river, and working my way out towards Idaho city and maybe garden city but we will see where I end up
The middle fork of the Boise has some very good gold. A lot of it is pans only. Check the regs. Any place that has the Bull trout they get very concerned about anybody even looking at the water. They claim it's threatened ,yet it is everywhere and has a season on it.G/L
Yeah well they claim the kangaroo mouse is endangered and you can't drive in the desert without hitting them little *******s ,thanks for the tip though
Bubba, you'll find a huge culture shock moving fro Kal to Idaho.Most of the State and county LEOs are surprisingly level headed. I have had deputys and Fish and Game wardens sit down next to me and pan a little-just to sat howdy. Get into the Federalies and you can only guess.
I have noticed the the Leo's are really cool here, as for the culture shock I love it here, my wife is missing home but I just love it. I have been trying to get caught up on the mining laws and what you can and can't do where you can or can't do it.... it seems like the way the law is written you almost need a permit to use a sang shovel, so I am a little confused on what constitutes implement that is used to dig, scrape, dredge, or otherwise move stream bed materials from below the mean high watermark in search of minerals. Under the stream and channel act, can you help me understand this, am I OK to use a shovel, sluice, and pan or do I need a permit
I heard a guy saying that some of that epa crap is not enforced also, I guess I just need to find a local mining buddy at least till I get a good grip on the politics
The EPA essentially closed all but a small handful of streams to dredging. On those 4 or 5 waterways left they require an epa discharge permit in addition to the State water permit. Most ,if not all of the county sheriffs have gone on record as Constitutional Sheriffs and have stated they will not enforce their nonsense. I have not heard of 1 dredger being cited by the EPA. Federal agents have the threat of being arrested for interfering with a mining operation, if they decide to harass a miner.U.S. Congressman Shephard is a gold miner and has tried to intrduce legislation to do away with the EPA's arbitrary nonsense. Unfortunately the Professional hacks bottleneck him at very turn. We'll see this next term -maybe !
Hey Bubba, welcome to the gold world. Just a quick tip. You are going in the right direction first off. That is nice old placer material in your pic. You won't find much gold though. The cobbles in that material are too well sorted. (They are all the same size and small). The size of gold follows the size of material placed. Big gold "usually" is deposited where large heavy boulders are deposited. If you do find color in that material it will most likely be very fine flour. The up side is if you do indeed color there should be a much better area (with larger river washed boulders) "up" grade from where this deposit is!