Heading Up To East Fork!

[motherload]

I'm heading heading to East Fork in the San Gabriel Mountains within the hour. A bunch of us from two clubs will be up there all day!

Gold is good up there and if you get there early enough, the chow is good too!

I'll try to have a report later on!

[nuggethunting]

Hello Motherload,

Hope you all do well up in the Motherlode Country. Wishing you all the best of luck.

Keep us updated,

Rob Allison

[Guest keninla]

Hey Motherlode,

too bad I didn't check the forum before I left this morning. I also went to East Fork today. I was only there a couple hours - just to test out an extension I made for my sluice. Ran about 6 buckets of material through the slulce and got some fine gold. Not bad for so little dirt.

I was there last week with my dredge and did pretty well on fine gold- no nuggets though.

Maybe we can meet up sometime.

Hope you did well.

Ken

[motherload]

Too bad I didn't check the forum before I left this morning. I also went to East Fork today.

Wow! Maybe we saw each other and didn't know it!

I posted some photos here:

Gold Prospecting Photos

Not a lot, but you can sorta see what was going on.

Which club do you belong to?

[Guest keninla]

Wow! Maybe we saw each other and didn't know it!

I posted some photos here:

Gold Prospecting Photos

Not a lot, but you can sorta see what was going on.

Which club do you belong to?

I go to East Fork quite a bit. I have been thinking of joining the local GPAA club but have not done so yet. I guess the meetings are at Keene's - not too far a drive for me.

I use to be a member of Prospector's Club of So Cal but did not like driving all the way to Downey on a Friday night in traffic so I let my membership lapse.

How about you?

Ken

[dutch john]

Old dutch here... please excuse me for butting in. I agree the traffic

is horrendous going to the PCSC on Friday. I do not mean to

change the subject about the East Fork... However, the PCSC also put

on simply great monthly outings; beaches and parks, etc. They also

have a couple of claims in the Randsburg/El Paso Mtn and Summit

Diggin's area. The persistent members (ie Dean, and Martin, and

"sandtrap") are still finding small pickers and flakes... and maybe an

occasional clunker while drywashing and detecting. Also... this is a broad

area... not all of the BLM ground in under claim. There are "fringe areas"

that are worth nugget hunting. One of the PCSC club claims can make

a good hassle-free base camp.

Now back to the East Fork....

[motherload]

I'm (sort of) a member of the Route 66 Gold Miners Club out of Brea. I've never officially joined them or anything.

Brea is about 30 minutes from Azuza which is really close to the actual park.

The problem I see with that park is that is to too easily accessible by families wanting to go swimming and picnicking. It's about a 10:1 ratio of general public to prospectors. The picnickers have little respect for the prospectors, their work area, or their equipment. Frankly, from all the trash I saw, they have little respect for the environment as well.

There was very little traffic on the way up on Sunday morning and very little on the way out mid-afternoon. I could see how there would be a lot of traffic on both ends of a weekend as there were a lot of parked cars and none of them looked like they could move very fast.

[whats4supper]

The better gold is up in the narrows, but it takes a chain gang to get the equipment up, as it is a few miles north of the parking lot. I know of people that have set up dredges and run them for a week straight. it produces quite a few 3dwt nuggets.

\

You can also get gold in cow canyon, just to the east of the east fork area. sometimes there is water, but works out better is you work a recirc (hi-banker) with impounded water and a trash pump. I think the gold is coming out of the mt baldy drainage, which includes cow canyon, and flows into the san gabriel river. If you are really a hiking dud(e), make a foray up to the stanley-miller mine and catch a glimpse of precarious existence while holding onto a cable along the pack trail, hundreds of feet above the river gorge. one slip and ... well. the whole mine is built in stilts, and most of the mine dump ended up in the river below.

Another alternative is to approach the gold areas south of littlerock and pear blossom, and this gives a few people some detecting ground as well. there are several approaches to gold bearing dirt on the northern flank of the san gabriels, coming in from hesperia, and working westward to little rock. most of it is fairly small gold, but there are pockets where a lot of small gold collects. If you want to know, there is some decent gold in lytle creek, though a really decent area is now part of the plinking area. if you work the Eastern side of lytle creek, from the freeway, north, and up past the texas cut (hydraulic mine), there is a reasonable chance to score some 1/2 ounce nuggets or smaller.

The cajon creek gold is small, but one can find wires and small chips, some coming in from cleghorn, and crowder canyons. there is also an old chinese (miner) camp up near the wrightwood, silver lake road (sort fo east of the freeway), but it is tough to find if you don't know the precise location, it's off to the north of the winds, and the road doesn't have pullouts to park.

There is also an old gold camp named fairview, that is located north of clairemont/cucamonga, but you would have to locate older maps to find it. the newer usgs maps do not indicate the site, and for all I know, maybe it's a housing tract by now. it's located near the head of a big wash in the foothills opening up into the inland valley. It's been a while or I would give you better landmarks. Fairview was one of those camps of the turn of the 1900's, and the potential for gold nuggets are there, locatable with better detector technology. I found some chips with a white's 4900, that's how long ago I was on the site.

A guy can almost make the San Gabriels a life study in gold

[Guest keninla]

The better gold is up in the narrows, but it takes a chain gang to get the equipment up, as it is a few miles north of the parking lot. I know of people that have set up dredges and run them for a week straight. it produces quite a few 3dwt nuggets. ...

\

Whats for supper,

You are right about the better gold being up at the narrows but you can't dredge there. No motorized equipment allowed past the cattle canyon bridge. It must have been a long time since you were there. You can take a sluice and use that. It is a long hike as you say.

Ken

[Reno Chris]

It must have been a very long time as I got my first CA dredge permits around 1978 and you couldn't go past the Cattle Canyon bridge even then.

Chris

[whats4supper]

wow, I was up there in 1989 and it was a ranger who told me about going up stream, on the east fork of the san gabriel river, up in the narrows. I didn't get hassled and I had the setup working (3-inch dredge) just short of a week. I also had 7 grunts consisting of a boy scout troop. Everybody got a nice nugget (even the ranger) and I got what was left (it was a nice poke too).

I was all set to work below like the rest of the clouts

You just never know what information is the "right" information out of a ranger's mouth.

I made a mistake in the other post. I didn't mean Hesperia; I meant Phelan. I don't know why Hesperia seems to be a rock in my road- maybe it's a hex from Mojave John. 'Course I had relatives that worked the mines in the area since day one in 1850, but I am not going to essay that point.

I saw some dredgers down in Cajon Creek, between cleghorn and blue cut over the weekend, and they was getting salt sized gold, but were having some problems with the black sand clogging up the riffles. I (with their permission) opened up the riffles a bit to allow better retrieval of gold while flushing the black sand (the whole area seem to be mostly black sand from granitoid rocks).

They didn't think the setup would work like I said it would, so I told them to run a couple of hours then pan the gold and give me a call. I think I was just parking at the beach (HB) when the phone rang. Bill and Mike said their cleanup of the modified run got them more gold than they ever got before, but couldn't understand why the black sand would flush out and the gold would hang. I told them that in gold mining, sometimes a guy has to go against logic in order to have success; that and the fact that I worked that all out after spending a lot of effort and money figuring out the right tweak, and going back and forth to test the variables.

Back to the East Fork, while a lot of people spend time in the water, and prying on BIG rocks with gad bars and comealongs, don't forget that the banks high and dry were once part of the stream bed, and someone working a highbanker in the right strata (as in the cobble layers) stands a pretty good chance of scoring better than the overworked parts of the river. Actually the bank is virgin ground. On the freeway side are some pretty good pockets (the freeway to nowhere). but there are banks on both sides that can be very productive. The one problem is one has to move a lot of dirt to open up a productive pocket, as everything above wants to slide into the hole. Maybe fate will smile on your hard work; maybe not. gold mining has about the same odds as playing poker- some win really, really big, while some end up really, really big losers. Ain't no way to know how the cards will fall beforehand, and what your fate is.

[Guest keninla]

Concerning the Rangers/ DFG people at the East Fork of the San Gabriel- I really don't think most of them are familiar with the rules and regs about dredging in Calif. I see many illegal things go on at the East Fork and the rangers never seem to do anything about it.

For example I saw that one person with a large dredge and big winch actually build a concrete and steel base to mount his winch on down in the river bed. He did it so that his winch would not pull out when he was moving large boulders.

I have seen people with high bankers have their tailing slurry feed directly back into the river without a settling pond- not supposed to do that.

I have never yet seen anyone at the East Fork have their dredge permit checked.

I always have a permit and I don't do any of those other things either.

I suspect that someone with a small dredge could quietly go up the canyon and dredge and maybe not get cited (and equipment confiscated) but I would not want to take that chance.

Ken

[whats4supper]

I sort of think that rangers in the east fork are in the breaking in-period, you know, still nice, want to get along, and overlook a lot of things that say, some ranger in the glamis sand dunes or up in Mono County would kill to beat you with, and score big-time brownie points.

Probably everything you (Keninla) mention probably goes along without questions. No one ever wanted to even see my dredging permit anywhere in the watershed, nor any other official paper for that matter. I didn't even know that a dredging permit was required anywhere but in the sierras or trinities. I sure never used one in Lytle creek, or on the ortega highway, nor even in the kern river out of bakersfield.

I think that is why the rangers of any type are so messed up: no one has the facts straight and everyone has their own set of rules and regs to hammer a guy with. The same holds true to the variances and fees of mining claims that differ from one state to the next, or even one area within the state compared with another area justa few miles away or in a different county. the law is what they say it is, and no across the board uniformity in what or which regulations apply in similar situations across the west.

People witha little authority over others.... I don't think that it is possible to know or find all the answers in the blm or DFG, or any other federal code. I think their code is as ambiguous and messed up as the Tax code, and no two answers are any where near the same

[dutch john]

Personally... I stay away from the area simply because of the negative element that

now can sometimes be found in the area (Up from the vast LA area.) Thus the East Fork

can sometimes be one big trash can. And worse.

I was with the San Bernadino "Arrowhead Prospectors" back in the early 1970's.

Dredge permits were free... just needed to apply... I had a small Golddiver dredge...

Bert was then in Torrence manufacturing it... later he moved to Carson City area. Now

he has retired. The Golddiver really a good design... I recently sold mine to K.L. Kassai.

Back in the very early 1970s, it was easy to stop and drywash along much of area.

No one would bother you. Now everything has changed. If I now go there I do

not go alone, but with others. I once enjoyed going to Follows Camp (this was years ago)

where I would safely park for a small fee and then wander up the river

detecting the dry ground for nuggets... but "my o' my" (or as Tom M. would say

"Man o' Man") the trash. However, I guess Williams Camp is still open and a safe haven.

But I have not been there for several years. However gold can be found in the San

Gabriel area... Just be careful and "watch your back." I cannot remark about the rangers...

never had a problem...

Currently I enjoy the "beach train" and spend the day working the wet sand during low

tide. Also go with several friends. The beaches have been packed. I do not work the

blanket line; but the lane. I have worked the beaches since the 1970's and have always

enjoyed it.

[whats4supper]

it used to be the biker crowd that were the fringe bunch, but now its the cholos making the rounds and even worse, the off-road or 4x4 element with tattoos, hard living, meth, and gang mentality pushing their way out where the law is far behind and away. Subversives and outlaws (even if it's an illusion) that won't stop at nothing to bully or maim if you end up being surrounded or stand your ground.

Opportunists in or out for the kill. No one is safe in the sticks anymore. sad but true. How many rangers wanted to be just a natire lover, and out of neccesity, had to become a cop instead to deal with the onslaught of these types?

[Guest keninla]

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I think that is why the rangers of any type are so messed up: no one has the facts straight and everyone has their own set of rules and regs to hammer a guy with.

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You are right about that. A couple of years ago after I had been panning/sluicing on the river for a while I decided that to be really succesful I needed get a dredge to really move some dirt. I wanted to do everything legal and also make sure that I could dredge in the San Gabriel River so I called the Forest Service and asked about dredging. The nice woman I talked with said she did not know and would have to get back to me. Later she calls and says she talked with her supervisor and he said that NO dredging was allowed anywhere on the river except at the private areas like Follows Camp or Camp Williams. Well that did not seem right so I managed to get all of the rules and regulations on dredging- read them from one end to the other and found out what the real story is. Only dredging allowed on the East Fork below Cattle Canyon Bridge. the regs are quite clear on that.

Unfortunately, the people that are supposed to know often don't know.

Ken

[AZBirddog]

Whats4supper

I take exception with the statement (the off-road or 4x4 element with tattoos, hard living, meth, and gang mentality pushing their way out where the law is far behind and away.)

I go off roading and 4x4 ing with a lot of very nice people. They have respect for other peoples property and

the animals and plants that live in the desert. Granted there are some unruly offroaders, but it is not fair

to blame all of use for what a few idiots do. My 2 cents. AZ

[29prospector]

AZBirddog,

I have met alot of 4x4'er/offfroaders out here in 29. The locals police themselves and belive you me you don't want them policing you. It's just like mining/prospecting, some will dig a hole 2 foot deep and walk away, leaving a sode or beer can behind. The places they go look worse after they leave, and than along comes a couple locals that clean up the mess.

Times have changed, some of the people who have not had much of an upbringing, are going out to the boom docks as they think and shit all over the place. leaving the mess for the 90% that care. BLM does not checkl enough I think, now before you slit my throat, I'm not a big fan of the BLM. This subject is one that will take years to fix and I just don't see that happening.

[AZBirddog]

29prospector

I know exactly where you are coming from . My problem was grouping all off-roaders

into on big group of dope smoking, tattooed a**holes. I know that there are plenty of Idiots

that just leave their crap on the ground in the desert and any other place that they habitat.

I'm just standing up for the one's (prospector and offroaders) that have respect for mother nature

and her property. AZ

[29prospector]

29prospector

I know exactly where you are coming from . My problem was grouping all off-roaders

into on big group of dope smoking, tattooed a**holes. I know that there are plenty of Idiots

that just leave their crap on the ground in the desert and any other place that they habitat.

I'm just standing up for the one's (prospector and offroaders) that have respect for mother nature

and her property. AZ

Well said Sir.

[FlakMagnet]

AZBirddog,

I am sure from what you have shown about yourself, it is clear that you, and the group you

belong to, are not who the posts above were about.

Don't know where you live, but probably you were brought up to respect the wild places.

A surprising number of the people who now frequent the San Gabriels are not like you.

Many seem to think that because they are out of 'city limits' the rules don't apply

when in fact the wilderness is exactly where you can see why certain ways of being are vitally important.

all the best,

Flak

[whats4supper]

notice, I did not say "ALL" 4x4 crowds.

i was camping once in Colorado, and some of the people I referred too started coming in droves and set up camp about a mile away in a clearing. drinking, drugs, rowdy, open sex, a big bonfire. I could hear screams and whoops that didn't sit well with me. When things later calmed down, I got my pack out (we both had to use the same road). Later I found out that police had been up to site site where they found a woman hacked up, pieces cut out while she was alive, raped, and apparently burned in the bonfire. They also found a man, still alive, that had been burned, cut, raped and tortured too.

there was maybe 150+ of them, and 1 of me with a clip. I have seen gatherings of this sort in California, out in Nevada, and when they start coming in, I don't wait around, i get out and quick. I don't go over to see if some of the homeboys are 'okay' people or how they think on this or that. enough liquor and the viloent down of meth highs can turn anybody around. no body is going to call in the law when things get out of hand. it's almost like mexico where the law does not exist outside of town, and most nobody will hear the screams of someone who thought they were going to a party, and instead, became the party.

That's probably why this sort of 4x4'er (not all are like this) or gang bangers get out in the sticks- they can do their thing and aint gotta worry about a shutdown.

That's what I am talking about, not the type that AZ Birddog is about

[29prospector]

AZ Birddog, Flak, whats4supper and all the rest.

I remember something my father said to me one day when I was just a teen. We were having lunch at the trailer by our rock cabin and and he says" look all around you, burn the picture in your mind because what you see now will be gone one day". I looked all around, the old mine equipment, the dump piles for cans and the homemade outhouse complete with homemade seat. I just knew that it would stay that way. When my wife and I went out for a little visit in 1973, I was totally torn up. the trailer was burned down, outhouse shoot up, cans scattered all over the place and enough broken bottles that it was safe to walk around. It took us almost a year to clean the place up. Even if we are just a few, we must do our part to make it safe for our children and grandchildren.

Peace..........29

[AZBirddog]

Flak and All

Live in Bullhead City Arizona across from Laughlin, Nevada. I run the hills all around AZ and NV

all winter long. We do see a little trash around. We try to pick-up as much as possible and keep the

BLM from closing what is left of the area. Lots of old mines on both sides to explore and many, many

trails to nowhere. Most end and we return the same way we went. We don't see a lot of people in the areas

that we travel, which is great. Lots of good areas to metal detect. Have a Great Day. AZ

[FlakMagnet]

AZbirddog,

That has always been one of the places that sounds like it has great potential.

Maybe one of these days we could all meet up and take a look with you.

all the best,

Flak