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Published: April 16th 2018
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We had such a fabulous day with Lee and Dee... the MOST fun... Dee had given me the address of their camp in Congress Arizona... I packed a picnic to share lunch upon arrival and plugged the address into the GPS, which indicated about an 1hr 40 min drive... so off we went... Nothing could have prepared us for what we were about to experience... the drive down to the camp after we left the highway, the camp itself, and our day of panning for GOLD!
The drive from Prescott to Congress was uneventful... same ole same ole... I swear, all of Arizona is the same... brown! We take pictures and they all end up looking the same 😊 Dee had told me once I got to this little town of Yarnell I would be turning on a dirt road, and it would be about a 8 mile drive... so don't be alarmed! Good thing she provided that information because when the GPS told me to turn here... well it was just literally a dirt road!! As soon as I entered the road, we were greeted by a cow sitting on the side of the road!!! OMG... and then we
saw the sign 'Primitive Road - enter at your own risk' 'Curves Mountain Grades'... well that wasn't a lie... we started down this narrow (and I do mean narrow) dirt road - going straight down - no edges on the sides of the road - and I was driving!!! No two cars could pass eachother - we couldn't figure out how is the hell Lee drove his truck towing his 40' 5th wheel down this road!!! There was no turning back.... you just had to go with it! It took about 30-45 minutes to get to the bottom of the mountain... and my knuckles were white! But sure enough, we came around the mountain and there it was!
Enter LDMA Stanton Camp. Lost Dutchman's Mining Association (LDMA) is a gold prospecting club - you have to be a member of this association in order to camp and mine the area. Once known as Antelope Station, Stanton experienced gold rush fever in the form of a gold strike in 1863. What was once a stage stop transformed over night into a western boomtown thanks to its rather large deposits of gold. Today the buildings still stand and are in disarray...
however are still being used - the camp's office was once the stage stop! The town saloon is now the recreation hall and the former hotel is a small library, kitchen, and game room. This truly is the long lost Wild Wild West. Stanton is a registered ghost town and is visited by groups looking for that glimpse or feel from those from long ago... Lee was telling us that there have been campers that say they have experienced those sightings in the saloon and recreation hall!!
After a quick lunch, we were ready to get in their gator (ATV) and venture off into the desert to find where Lee has been digging... He had previously gathered 7 buckets of bedrock in preparation for our experience when we get back to the campsite. After about a 15 minute ride, we arrived to a opening that had several rocks stacked together as a marker... we turned and rode down a rough path to a dry rock bed - there we found Lees area where he has worked diligently since late October! I asked him how in the world he found this place... in the middle of the desert - how
do you know there is gold? He shared how another miner showed him how to use the 'rods' ... just like the old days looking for water, these rods indicate if there is 'gold down there'! Like he said, you have to be a believer for this to be effective - he even performed a couple of tests to see if the results were real - and sure enough it held true! So, whose to question... if it works for him that's what counts! Along the path back to the campsite, Lee was showing us how the writings on the rocks were there from centuries ago from the Indians. We also saw cactus' ... a cactus has to be over 75 years old before it starts to grow an arm, so those we saw were extremely old! When you see holes in the cactus, that typically is where the birds have their nests!
So back to the campsite I was ready to get dirty!! All the campers in the campsite had similar configurations of mining equipment behind their rigs. Lee said he would go out in the mornings mining his location and would return with his buckets by 1
every day. Then he would spend his afternoons processing them. And it is a process... you start by putting the 'dirt' in the conveyor belt, with running water through it. Mark was curious about the degree of the belt; Lee said it had to be a 10% radius - anything less would catch too much trash and anything greater would loose too much gold!! At any rate we poured the buckets, one at a time, onto the belt as the water carefully washed the dirt down to the mesh ... which would catch any sediment that is heavier than water...aka GOLD! Lee would wash/rinse the mesh into another container to release anything caught ... then from that he would scoop that into another machine that would rinse the sediment until the final results were obtained - you see in the pictures that the 7 buckets resulted into a very small amount of sediment ready to be 'panned'. Lee painstakingly began to 'pan' that sediment to reveal the gold. Gold is heavier than sand so as he swirled the clean water across the black sediment the gold started glistening on the pan... even though the pieces of gold are small slivers
- it adds up! Gold is now going for about $1500 per ounce, so like Lee said, he ain't gonna get rich!! Dee showed us what he's accumulated thus far and I was impressed!!! There is GOLD in them there hills 😊
As the afternoon fell upon us so did the cows! Lee said the damn cows come out every afternoon looking for water... he has to chase them off his equipment for fear they will damage his stuff! Too funny for sure!!!
When we got ready to leave we found out that the path we took coming into the camp was the WRONG ONE! He showed us another way out - still a dirt road but definitely a lot easier to travel! We laughed about it almost all the way home 😊
This was a day we will long remember.... so much fun!
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