Gold!. Ian Neligh
underwater, and a cold front had blown in,” Reid said, feeding more wood to the fire. “It was eighteen degrees outside and I had a wet suit flash freeze to my body. I was in trouble.”
Ken Reid is full of stories like this. Stories that elicit his conspiratorial laughter, as if you were there with him that unfortunate day, looking in horror at the amalgamation of flesh and wet suit. It turns out in this case, thankfully, he wasn’t far from a building with a fireplace and was able to free himself from the frozen suit. It was a mistake he would never make again.
So during the winter he now spends his time panning through the dirt and rock he collected over the warmer months. He poured water into the tub resting on the two buckets and filled a faded green gold pan with dirt and started panning.
No time wasted, Ken Reid is always prospecting. No fleck of the yellow metal is too small to evade his scrutinizing gaze. And he finds it regularly. He says he bought the Cave with the gold he found out in front of it. Looking for gold is what he’s done most of his life. And one day he plans to find the mother lode.
Squirrely
Reid said he has prospected for gold for forty-five years but admits he was less than successful during his early attempts. He grew up in Denver and was seven years old when his parents gave him a gold pan to keep him busy while they went fishing in the Rockies.
“I was always out fishing with the family, being out by the river and thinking, Hey, gold was found in this river and we’re fishing next to it. Why can’t we find gold today?” But he was searching for treasure long before then. Arrowheads, antique bottles—as a young kid he was always looking for something. Then he found gold and everything changed.
As a teenager he had a dream that he could go up into the mountains and make money simply by looking for gold. Reid bought an old van and drove up on the weekends and continued searching for the elusive metal.
“A little bit here and there, most of it was fool’s gold, a lot of mica,” Reid said. “Everything that sparkled was gold. The learning curve was very hard, until you can find somebody to take you under their wing and really show you what you’re doing.”
Reid went to prospecting stores located near a mall, long ago demolished, called Cinderella City. By talking to a few of the old-timers hanging out in the shops, he said he honed his obsession and gained the skills necessary to make it a reality. He was eighteen years old before he found anything substantial. When it happened he was near the City of Golden just west of Denver. That day he said he found enough gold to get him hooked for life. After that it was an evolution. His thought process turned from simply panning for gold to dredging for it.
To dredge for gold is to use a machine that removes sand and gravel from a streambed. The non-gold material is then sorted out and washed away. Reid now relies on suction dredging, which requires him to be in a wet suit at the bottom of a stream using a hose to pull in the gold-rich rock and dirt.
“How can I move more gravel material? It’s a game of volume,” Reid said. “I’m beyond the hobby stage. It is more of an obsession and, yes, I do make money at it.” He said his passion for finding gold has taken him all over the United States. During his best year he found $62,000 in gold in ninety days.
“I’ve paid for two pieces of property in gold dust and made my land payments in gold that I mined off the property,” he said with a degree of professional pride. Finding gold is hard; finding enough gold to make a living is near impossible. Reid is by all accounts very good at looking for gold and is obviously, and more importantly, good at retrieving it.
One year he came across a stretch of Clear Creek, not far from where George Jackson originally discovered gold on that snowy bank so many years before, which helped to bring about the gold rush. It’s the best place for finding gold that he’s ever seen, and he’s been working that area for the past twenty-five years.
Despite Clear Creek County’s history of a gold rush and eighty years of organized mining, Reid believes only 3 to 10 percent of the gold has ever been removed.
“We’re sitting on billions of dollars’ worth of value here.”
But it is hard to imagine where that gold would be, or even if it were possible to remove. Today the majority of the county’s nine thousand residents are nestled along a razor-thin valley bookended by the mountains and Interstate 70. Space and tourism are the most important commodities in the county. There’s literally no room for new mining operations or, failing that, the essential governmental willingness—especially when tourism dollars glitter ever more brightly than gold.
Those interested in mining or prospecting have to do so along the footsteps and in the ruins of those who have come before. Clear Creek travels sixty-six miles from the Continental Divide to the Great Plains, where it eventually merges with the South Platte. It’s along this stretch Reid discovered gold. Like any self-respecting prospector he got a claim, which gives him the right to legally remove the gold from the area, while forbidding all others. Because finding successful pockets of gold has historically been difficult, especially now after nearly one hundred years of mining, Reid said he occasionally finds unfriendly competition.
Every year someone will come down to his portion of the stream and tell him they heard gold was found there. His response is to the point: “‘Yeah, but I own the property, I’m the one who found the gold—and I don’t want you on that property.’ And I have to ask them to leave, sometimes on a daily basis.”
He said that over the years people have become “squirrely” about the issue or even hostile. It has gotten bad enough that he sometimes brings his handgun with him.
“I’ve had some [prospecting] neighbors that were next door that were less than cordial,” he said, “and I wouldn’t go to my property without a gun.”
Gold Fever
Ken Reid said he knows people whom he can trust implicitly with his money. People who will starve before thinking of spending even one dollar of his cash and breaking his trust.
“But they’ll fistfight their brother over a flake of gold—and I’ve seen them do it,” Reid said. “Gold fever is a real thing. People see gold and it just boggles their mind to the point where they think that the gold is more valuable than the cash. I’m not going to fistfight you over a flake of gold—but I’m not going to let you take a flake of gold from me either.”
Between tools and land, Reid has put $100,000 over the years into looking for the yellow metal. “Run away, do not catch gold fever; it will make you obsessed,” he said. “I have spent every bit of gold that I have ever found on acquiring more equipment to go after more gold.”
About twenty-five miles away from Ken Reid’s Man Cave in the town of Golden, Colorado, gold-panning veteran Bill Chapman leaned against the counter of the prospecting supply business Gold-n-Detectors. Chapman said, with all seriousness, that gold fever is a real condition. One that he’s seen in himself and others.
“I have been in the ‘hobby’ over forty years—and I still have dreams about finding gold and about prospecting,” Chapman said. For him, gold fever can be summed up in one word: “lust.”
“It is the thrill of the hunt and the thrill of the find,” Chapman explained. “And if I get a little gold—that is all well and good.” Chapman said going out and finding the precious metal, for almost no money, is a challenge that many are happy to try their hand at.
“But then it gets in your system, it gets in your blood,” Chapman said. “And gold fever is a real thing, it is absolutely genuine, and we have seen it amongst our customers.” Chapman noted it hits people the worst who go out and are successful at looking for gold the first time.
“There’s a lure behind gold that attracts people to it.”
Gold Dust Dreams
Back at the Man Cave, Ken Reid was sitting on an overturned white bucket and panning through gravel and dirt with that old green-colored gold pan. Green is used because it’s