Gold!. Ian Neligh
said. “It’s just the allure of how beautiful it is, every piece of gold is different.” With a plastic snuffer bottle Reid sucked up the small gold flecks he regularly discovers.
He rarely scores an actual gold nugget and most of the gold he collects is in gold dust. He said oftentimes a nugget, however, is worth more than its weight in gold because of its uniqueness.
“When you find a nice specimen, every one is unique, every one is different, and no two nuggets are the same,” Reid said.
It’s not unusual to find Reid walking the streets of Idaho Springs during the summer and digging into his deep pockets to pull out a nugget to show off in the bright mountain light.
“Everybody is looking for that big piece of gold; you’re more likely to find a five-carat diamond in the Earth’s crust than you are a one-ounce gold nugget.” With a dreamy look he recalled the story of how he once found a nugget that was shaped exactly like a horse’s head. For years it replaced the knight on his chess table.
“I never did find the entire chess set.”
Reid said he doesn’t have any difficulty finding people willing to take gold instead of cash.
“I’ve paid for land with gold, I’ve paid for mining equipment in gold, I’ve paid for cars in gold,” Reid said. Another time he found a piece of wire gold shaped like a spinal column. He traded it to a chiropractor for work on his ailing back. Being hunched over a stream with a gold pan is physically difficult work. Reid said he is able find relief from his aches and pains diving under the stream for hours at a time to look for gold.
“It is still a lot of work digging underwater but I have the buoyancy of the water and it really helps the joints, the back, when I’m laid out in the stream,” Reid explained.
“Rock Wrestling”
Under the fast-moving brown water Reid does what he calls “rock wrestling,” or digging up and moving boulders to get his dredge’s hose under them. He’s dove as deep as thirty feet, trying to get at where the gold might be hiding. “I am diving in hypothermic swift water at altitude; these are all dangerous things.”
It’s not always gold that Reid finds under the water. Over the years he’s discovered railroad spikes, railroad tracks, old shovels, broken glass, and other relics from the area’s mining history.
“The top five to six feet of the river is man-made trash,” Reid said. “Clear Creek is literally filled in over the last 150 years of mining up here with man-made debris. Once you get below that six-foot level you’re down to a level where man hasn’t been.”
History states that some hard rock mines were built under Clear Creek, but Reid said he isn’t worried about coming across an old shaft and being sucked into one. He said any shaft that has already come that close to the river is likely already filled in with water, and added he occasionally comes across placer mine shafts in the river that once were located beside it. One in particular he knew was in his area and spent three years looking for with an old photograph.
“I have a 1902 USGS report showing that shaft is sixty feet deep. I want to dive that shaft,” Reid said. Because he is considered a prospector, Reid is allowed to remove seventy tons of material a year without a mining permit from the state of Colorado.
“I don’t count how many tons of gravel that I remove—but the year I find seventy tons of gold I’ll get a permit,” he said, shaking the Man Cave with his laughter.
Reid has supplemented his income with gold prospecting but this year he plans to make his entire living looking for and finding gold. Formerly the operator of an antique and pawn store in Idaho Springs, his business wasn’t making a profit and he had to close its doors.
“I’m going to dedicate this entire year, this is what I’m going to do,” Reid said. “I’m working a part-time job to get through the winter, but come springtime I’m going digging.”
Reid said that if he ever does come across a lot of gold, he would spend the money traveling the world and looking for more gold until he was broke again.
“This is no get-rich-quick scheme.” But for now, while the winter winds still tugged at the outside of his Man Cave and the drifts of snow collected outside the building, he’ll spend his time panning through buckets of dirt for more gold dust. Gold dust is what Reid finds the most of, adding that 90 percent of his gold weight is found in dust and little flakes.
“You’ll find pounds of that gold dust before you find a nugget,” he said. “But nuggets take a premium. You can get four or five times on a very characteristic piece of nugget gold.”
Removing and collecting such small pieces of gold requires tremendous patience. It’s a difficult pastime and he said people often don’t, or can’t, keep at it.
“A lot of people don’t last at it because it is so tedious,” he explained. “They want to run out and get all the big pieces of gold and think they’re going to go off skipping to the bank and get rich, rich, rich.”
He admitted some have stumbled across a big piece of gold or two—but often it’s the small stuff that provides a decent and regular payout. “Why would you want to throw away gold when it is here for the taking?”
He uses a dredge for most of his major gold operation during the summer, but he’s not ashamed to go back to using a gold pan.
“It all starts with a pan. I don’t care where you’re prospecting at—you’re not going to go in with a million-dollar track hoe and dig up gravel and say, ‘OK, there’s the gold,’” Reid said. “For anybody who’s prospecting, 90 percent of the people are using the pan.”
The idea is a beginner starts off with an affordable gold pan costing maybe $12 and then moves up in equipment as they find more gold.
“I started with a pan when I was a little kid and every year I just progressively added on,” Reid said, pointing to the various corners of the Man Cave. “Here we’ve got a screen over here, we’ve got a power crusher there, we’ve got a kiln there, we’ve got a magnetic separator there, we’ve got a vented hood for our assessor lab stuffed over here. There’s a shaker table and a power screener outside.”
But watching Reid use a gold pan is like watching someone who has mastered their craft. His technique is fast and efficient. The way he used the water to pull the rock and dirt from the pan is second nature. Soon all that was left behind was the fine, heavier magnetic material and gold.
It didn’t take him long before ultrabright flecks of gold started appearing amid the fine black sand consisting largely of iron and magnetite. He took a large magnet and moved it around inside the pan, pulling the black material out. Before long only a small line of yellow dust remained. He sucked up the gold dust and started again with another scoop of gravel. He submerged the pan in water, shook it, and let a wavelike motion of water remove the dirt.
He reached in with his massive fingers and removed the stones, tossing them aside. “Just like any trade, anybody can go out and buy a saw and a hammer and call themselves a carpenter, but it takes years and years of work to become a master carpenter.”
Reid said it is the same with gold panning. Again he reduced the rock and dirt to black sand in which several small flakes of yellow gold peered up at him through the dim and smoky light. “I find gold every day I look for it.”
Despite years of gold mining and prospecting, he stated all the gold hasn’t been removed from Clear Creek. Rather, erosion helps to replenish it every year.
“The gravel bed is always moving. If you actually look at the gravel bed, it is a flowing mass; it’s moving at glacial speed,” Reid said.
Helping Hand
Reid said he’s happy to share the stream with the summer recreational users. He added many times the rafting guides will see where he is in the water and try to steer around him. And in return he’s already in the water if someone falls out of a boat.