All that glitters is not gold

After we came home from our hike to Timp Cave, Aaron took Ammon and me back up the canyon above Tibble Fork to try our luck at panning for gold. We spent a few fun hours...if you call wet shoes, dust from the passing four-wheelers, muddy clothes, spider webs, ticks, (did I mention dust?) fun. No, it was fun to watch Ammon and Aaron wading in the creek, digging up the rocks and mud, putting them in their pans and swishing and sloshing until all they had left was a little "black sand" on the bottom of the pan which was supposed to contain valuable gold dust, or even finer "gold flour". You should have seen Aaron's delight when he found some large nuggets in his pan. After this, his search was on the verge of frenzy. He found a large boulder and dug the dirt and rocks from underneath it for quite a while until he had filled a 5-gallon bucket about three-fourths full. After trying to use a portable sluice box to speed the process they went back to panning out the rest of their findings. Imagine Aaron's disappointment when he checked one of the larger nuggets after he noticed it was kind of dancing along on the top of the dust as he swished it around. Gold's weight should not allow it to move so freely. On further inspection he decided he had been fooled...fool's gold or iron pyrite. Who knows, maybe there was a grain of gold in there. With that in mind, Aaron definitely plans to return for another try at gold mining. I hope I can go along.



It is kind of hard to see but this is the bounteous black sand that held the ore mined today. If you enlarge the pictures, you can see a couple flecks that glitter.