Heading Up To East Fork!

[whats4supper]

AZ BD: Though many places there were hunted for silver (moss mine was almost a pure chunk), including the old butte mine at Union Pass (also housed a still in prohibition), there's lots of decent gold in the drainages towards the river on the AZ side.

You could take the Katherine road northward to the Portland Mine (Gold); east out of Katherine to Tyro; Northward from union pass on the river side to the Tyro stopes (you could easily put a laughlin tower into some of these without hitting bottom or the sides). o0r take the exhilrating jeep road aroun the hill north of Union butte (Arabian Mine) and run into more mines (gold).

If you go the Thumb Butte way (you know, the hill that's giving you the finger, AZ style), there are some old mines and really old rock mill foundations, and plenty of relics if you get out and hike a bit. Or follow the coal pipeline up and over secret pass.

None of the mines in the Oatman Mountains area, north to the Portland shut down for lack of ore; they were shut down during WW2 by the government. Up until that time, most of the mines had two shifts, and some, three shifts, including the relatively rich Katherine Mine, Arabian Mine, Tyro, Gold Road, Tom Reed in Oatman and the Secret Pass Mine.

I found my first gold nugget in the area where Silver Creek meets the bullhead (old) highway. It was a 3 1/2 ouncer. There's lots of placer all along silver creek, but I never found any more nuggets witha detector. The whole drainage has decent placer though the largest gold I found with a drywasher was like flattened 00 buckshot. There's great nugget ground in the Mohave Mountains down near Havasu, and also in the whipple mountains south of needles, both sides of the road. You might even find a pothole along the river with decent pokes.

I never found decent placer on the Nevada side, though a well digger vbrought up a button under 65 feet of alluvial material off the laughlin road after getting out of the curves. I did sluice some gold out of grapevine creek, though the new road cut off access. There are lots of pinky finger joint sized nuggets in teh washes out of golden shores, going back up towards Oatman or the warm springs, but it's rugeed country and plenty sandy