Four hours of panning and I was totally hooked!” Those are the words of a new gold prospector, Henry Kutash of Fairfield, Connecticut. When asked how he got started in gold prospecting, Henry said he had originally panned for gold in historic Jamestown, California and also a little in various areas of southern California. But he didn’t find much gold there, so he kept searching for a new, more productive, area to spend his valued vacations.

Last summer, Henry traveled 2,800 miles to attend a weekend training program sponsored by The New 49’ers gold prospecting association in Happy Camp, California. Very educational weekend training programs are scheduled throughout the summer months. Members of this Association gain access to 60+ miles of mining properties managed by The New 49’ers, and get to keep all the gold they can find. Henry was determined to recover his fair share!

The New 49’ers sponsor a number of organized events, including specialized training programs and group mining projects. Henry definitely took advantage of each and every day of his two-week visit to Happy Camp. He participated in every activity that was scheduled, took every lesson that was available and went along on all the organized outings. He was particularly impressed with how friendly and helpful everyone was in Happy Camp. According to Henry, “The nicest thing about the New 49’ers is that they are so family-oriented. A lot of family members were enjoying prospecting together.”

During the first week, Henry learned how to really use his metal detector for nugget shooting. “Not that it’s so difficult, actually,” said Henry, “It’s just that it takes some practice to atune yourself to what you are listening for. To find gold nuggets with a detector, you just have to get out there and work at it. Happy Camp gave me the opportunity to receive some expert help which moved me along quite rapidly on the learning curve. Of course, it also helps to be in the right location!” Henry attended the advanced class taught by Gordon Zahara—who is northern California’s leading specialist in metal detecting for gold. Gordon sets up a special double set of headphones for his students so that he can listen in on what they are doing with the detector. Sometimes there is very little difference in sound from specific hot rocks and some gold targets. So this training is worth years of trial and error. Henry learned to identify the sounds of hot rocks vs. good targets. He also became familiar with the ground balance function of his detector. Once he had mastered this—he was on his way to success!

Henry spent most of his two weeks panning and sluicing for gold—which mostly was fines and small flakes. While he was happy with this, he really wanted to find a nice nugget to take home. Deciding his best chances were with the use of his metal detector, he arranged with Gordon to go out to the Independence Claim and do some nugget shooting.

Soon after he began, Henry received a strong signal that for some reason started to decrease about four or five inches down. Yet, after he and Gordon removed some of the bedrock, the signal became strong again. Henry did not know there was a nugget until Gordon washed it off and dropped it in a cup—offering the prize to Henry.

“It looked like just a black rock to me,” said Henry. Yet, there in the cup, was a one-pennyweight nugget sitting up like a chocolate bunny!

Now that’s the way to end a vacation!

Besides, Henry had vowed not to shave until he found a gold nugget, so I’m sure there are some happy postal workers back in Fairfield!

Henry had sent postcards to many of the patrons along his route back home; but now the “clean shaven” Henry was really looking forward to showing them his nugget—especially to the woman at the bakery where he gets his coffee every morning…

“She’s going to faint when she sees this!” stated Henry.

Henry shared that he has no ties back home, that he can come and go as he pleases—so I feel it is safe to say that one of the places he’ll go next year is right back to Happy Camp, California.

Good Luck Henry!

When she was a girl, Joy Cole’s dad took her along on his gold prospecting trips. She shared his excitement when they found the precious stuff, and from him learned to know and love the western lands that hid its glory from the casual seeker.

Ed Cole grew up in Massachusetts, far from the lore and lure of gold. Even after serving seventeen years in the Navy, teaching telemetry at the Federal Electric Corporation, and working for Northrup, what he knew or cared about gold wouldn’t have quivered a troy weight scale.

Today, Joy and Ed have combined their interests, expertise, and abilities into a profitable connection with gold and gold mining. They’re a modern gold mining success story.

“Ten years ago,” Ed says, “I didn’t even know what a gold pan was. A friend’s wife was working in a publishing house that published treasure magazines. I started reading them and became interested in the whole idea. The more I read, the more interested I got.”

Joy, a petite, pretty gal with sparkling eyes, believes there’s more to it than that. She gets hunches. Maybe it has something to do with the close touch she’s had with the land, the love of it formed in those years she spent prowling and exploring with her father. She doesn’t apologize for respecting those feelings we can’t always explain.

“A friend of mine went to a gold show,” she recalls. “He took a picture of a truck with his camera. It was a dazzling gold affair with the word ‘Goldfinders’ painted across it. Many months later, when we first met, Ed showed me this picture. It was his truck. Guess who was walking up the path in the picture? Me!”

“And,” she continues, “as we got to know each other, we discovered that the last four digits of his store’s telephone were the same as the last four digits of my home phone.”

Joy felt it was karma, or fate, that brought them together; and the way things were going for Ed at the time, he’d probably agree.

After being bitten by the treasure bug through his reading, Ed invested in some silver. When its value started rising, he got excited about precious metals. In addition, he’d just sold his house for a tidy profit, made a windfall playing the then-popular Pyramid Game; and having little love for his 9-5 existence, decided to become a gold miner. “I didn’t know gold from mica, but I quit my job, bought a dredge, a wet suit, the whole nine yards, and went to Placerville to make my living mining gold.”

When he got there, he found it wasn’t quite that easy. “Here I am, and I don’t know how to do it, where to do it, or anyone who can show me. I ended up giving this guy $500 cash, with a promise to give him the first ounce of gold I got working his 20-acre claim.”

When he put his dredge in the river, there were four other hopefuls there before him—all working the same 20-acre claim. Ed’s weathered face breaks into a grin remembering his initiation into gold mining. “That guy never got any first ounce of my gold, because I never made an ounce that whole year!”

When winter came, Ed stopped mining. He still had plenty of money in the bank and nothing to do. He thought, “Here I am in Placerville, in the Mother Lode, and there’s not a mining supply store in town.” He decided to open one. In December, “Goldfinders” became a reality.

Then, when Spring came, Ed found himself living a familiar scenario. “I’m stuck in this damn store. I had quit my job before because I hated 9 to 5, and here I am—back to it again. I decide, the hell with this, sold everything, and went back to mining.” Ed holds up his toddy glass in salute, leaving it to you to decide which decision, quitting or starting, he’s drinking to.

Meanwhile, Joy’s love of rock-hounding and gold prospecting was keeping her out on the land she loved. After she was widowed, she became active in various gold prospecting and rockhounding clubs, was mining in the Coolgardie mining district in Barstow, and selling her own line of gold jewelry.

A fellow operating gravel pits along the Columbia River asked her to tell him how to recover the fine gold he was losing in his operation. Joy says, “A geologist had been out there and suggested he consult someone who could tell him how to save it. I turned out to be the ‘someone’.”

About this time, a friend approached her and asked her opinion of a separating device he’d invented. “The price of gold is going up,” she told him, “If it works, it’ll sell.” Joy was right. After some adjustments were made to the Gold Hawk Rocking Gold Pan, as it was called, they took it to the Coloma Gold Show where, she says, “It sold like hotcakes.”

Her reputation as a knowledgeable small-scale gold miner was growing, as well as her expertise in collectors’ items, gold bullion, silver and jewelry.

She and Ed first met at this show, and their common interest in gold mining and gold shows kept bringing them together.By now, not able to make a living at gold mining, Ed was back at a 9-5 job, locked into a lifestyle he hated. Weekends and vacation-time helped ease the tedium. Ed and Joy formed a partnership and mined together in the Coolgardie district. “It was kind of interesting,” she recalls, “what with the Mojave greens (rattlesnakes) and all.” In 1982 they added another facet to their gold mining partnership. They married.

Ed recalls how much he wanted to mine full time. “Gold mining was what I wanted to do, but I didn’t think I could make a living at it.” However, after months of discussion and indecision, they decided to go ahead. They said “good-bye,” to 9-5; “hello” to the goldfields.

During the years they’ve been mining full time, they’ve gained knowledge and experience in almost every aspect of small-scale gold mining.

Together, they’ve owned and worked heavy equipment, they’ve dry-washed, dredged and sniped. They have even drift-mined, something few small-scale gold miners have ever heard about, no less done. Today, most of their mining is the with a motorized sluice.

They are sought-after speakers for gold and treasure clubs. They give workshops and seminars for inexperienced miners. And, they willingly share their knowledge with anyone who is interested.

Joy has created beauty from the gold they work out of the earth. Her jewelry has found appreciative buyers, mainly because her work is different from most. “I don’t like doing the same as everyone else, “ she says. “I like to be an innovator, not an imitator. Once I see some of the things I’ve created being picked up by others, I create something new, different.”

Ed has invented a number of important gold and work-saving mining devices, some born of Joy’s suggestions.

Ed has very definite ideas about where small-scale gold mining is, and should be, going. He makes it clear he speaks for himself, not his wife, nor any gold mining organization. “There seems to be a feeling out there that the small-scale miner is getting something he’s really not entitled to. I don’t feel this way. I believe this is our land; it’s public land, we pay taxes on it, and small, recreational miners have as much right to mine it as big companies do.

“I think the only way the small-miner miner is going to keep his right to mine is to somehow get every treasure and gold prospecting club into one organization to fight for our right to use the public lands. It needs an organization with paid people—lawyers, administrators, public relations professionals—to do this. If we don’t pull it together now, we’re not going to have it later.” Ed raises his toddy, and we drink to that.

They are a complex couple, each complementing the other, each learning and doing with the other’s support. Ed is the consummate rebel. He left the Navy, on principle, three years before he would have been eligible for retirement and secure lifetime benefits. He broke from security and the established path to mine gold, a chancy occupation, at best.

Joy is a beautiful lady, like quicksilver, with a bubbling laugh and boundless enthusiasm for her lifestyle—a woman who counts a day lost if she hasn’t learned something new during the course of it.

Joy and Ed Cole represent what’s best in the small-scale mining field today. As self-employers, they bring dedication and persistence to what they’re doing, and wouldn’t think of doing anything else.

As miners, they bring independence, hard work, and respect for the environment in which they work. As entrepreneurs, they bring mining innovations and inventions to the market place. And as thinkers, they bring an awareness that, although government giveth, government can also taketh away.

By Marc Rogers

Gold prospector makes the best of new-found opportunities

A gold pan for Christmas! That’s what Philip received from his brother-in-law about eighteen years ago, and it gave him a good excuse to try panning on the streams that ran through the family ranch in Colorado. He didn’t find any gold on the ranch, but that didn’t stop him. He just started ranging out into other nearby areas to do his panning, places where gold had been found in the past.

He soon found himself spending more and more of his free time panning for gold, looking to find more of the shiny flakes he panned from the crystal clear streams. It was exciting each time he found a new spot that turned up some “color”, and he liked it! He continued panning until about 1980. When the price of gold went up so high, he decided it was time to buy a dredge; and he started taking at least part of every summer off to look for gold. All of his dredging was in Colorado for awhile, then he started wandering farther afield.

He spent some time one summer in Alaska; another year he spent some time in Arizona; and one year he went to Nevada. He found some gold everywhere he went, but not as much as he wanted to find.

He was working at strip mines during the winter months, but he wanted to spend more time gold mining, and finding more gold! Finally, in December of last year, he quit his job and went back to Arizona to look for gold.

While in Arizona he came across a copy of Gold & Treasure Hunter magazine, and liked what he read about The New 49’ers Prospecting Organization. Soon after, he met some New 49’er members, and was able to get further information from them. From the things they told him, this group seemed to be just what he was looking for. There was gold to be found, and without the type of hassles and problems that he’d encountered in the past, whenever he attempted to find a good place to dredge. Shortly thereafter he joined the club, and made plans to head up to Happy Camp early in the spring, taking his four-inch dredge along with him.

He arrived in Happy Camp before Memorial Day, and spent a little time asking questions before deciding where to dredge. He attended a couple of the Saturday evening group potlucks, asking questions of the members and Dave McCracken, to get an idea where he wanted to try first.

He finally decided to start dredging on one of the creek claims that had been in the club several years, but from what everyone had been telling him, had not been worked much.

He went up to look the area over and picked his location, based on what he’d been told by Dave and other 49er members. He knew the creek claims tended to have gold in pockets, and he might not find anything for awhile. But he also knew that everyone said there was nice coarse gold here–and that was what he was after! He wanted some “nice-sized gold,” instead of the fine gold that he had commonly found in the past!

As he set up in the creek and began to dredge, he tried to prepare himself for the possibility of not doing very well for a time. And then, Wow! The first time he checked his box, he had gold showing already!

Even though the creek water was cold, he was down there bright and early the next day, and every day that week. When potluck time rolled around the following Saturday, he had a nice-sized bottle of beautiful gold nuggets to show off! He worked there almost a month, until time for Dave McCracken’s weeklong dredging workshop for members, which he wanted to take part in. During that month, he had found 3 3/4 ounces of jewelry gold in his little spot!

After the workshop he felt more confident about working other areas; and since the gold was tapering off where he was, he moved on to another spot. He worked some of the larger creeks, and then on to the Klamath River, spending the entire summer, and part of the fall, dredging—and loving it! “The beauty, and the peace, of working in the river is spectacular!”

Philip is a hard worker when he’s dredging, and a little bashful, but he couldn’t help but make friends with a lot of the members. “They were all so helpful and friendly that I soon felt like they were family.” He soon found himself taking some time off for outings, with some of his new-found friends.

He had found that if he needed advice on where to dredge or how to get better recovery in a certain area, if he was having problems in any way, these friends would be right there to help. They respected his privacy, however, and that was one of the things he really liked about this group.

Then, as the days grew cooler and shorter, he began making plans to go back to work for the winter. As he prepared to leave town, he was enquiring about five and six inch dredges–it was hard to make up his mind just how much larger he wanted to go, but he was definitely going to have a larger dredge next year–this was FUN! “And, with the results I was getting with my four inch–Boy, what I might do with a six!” As he pulled out of town, he had a big smile on his face. He was already thinking of next year, and of all the gold and new adventures that awaited him.

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