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Colorado Gold Miner
Prospecting for Gold in the Colorado Rockies
Point Bar Public Mining Claim
If you are ever up the Arkansas River Valley near Salida, Co, be sure to bring your mining equipment with you. The public mining area at Point Bar, part of the Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area, is jointly maintained by The State of Colorado, the Gold Prospectors Association of America, and the Bureau of Land Management. The gold is fine, but plentiful in this area, so it is a worthwhile stop.
If you plan on using motorized equipment (highbankers, dredges, etc), you will have to visit the the BLM office in Canon City or Salida for a permit. Additionally there are restrictions on the use of dredges during certain times of the year when fish are spawning. You can check the BLM website for more details.
If you are just using a pan and sluice, you do not have to worry about permits. Be sure and bring a bucket and shovel, because the best areas are a ways from the River channel.
You should be able to see where others have been digging. Chances are, that if others have been digging there, you will find gold there as well. The overburden is fairly light at one to two feet thick. Below that you will hit a caliche layer from the ancient river bed where the Arkansas River flowed thousands of years ago.
This caliche layer is where you will find the most gold. It can be tough digging as the old round riverbed rocks are nearly cemented together from the chemical makeup, time and pressure. Be sure and wash the bigger rocks off. I usually bring two buckets with me… One empty and the other about half full of water to wash the rocks off in.
I normally use a half-inch mesh and classify everything down to a small size before sluicing it. This makes the sluice box run much smoother and the gold recovery higher because you don’t have the bigger rocks carrying your fine gold out the end.
My bucket with the water in it, I run through the sluice or just pan out. Most of the material is pretty fine in it, so it makes it a pretty easy job to pan or sluice. I usually save the concentrates from my cleanups until I get home.
You can take a cleanup wheel or recirculating mini-sluice to do your cleanup with. This makes for an easy time, but I usually work the sluice until dark, so I can get as much gold as I can while I am there.
Here are a few pictures from my last trip to Point Bar back in March. Notice the snow on the mountains around me…
Point Bar Diggings on the Arkansas River in Colorado. Notice the reddish color overburden. The off-white material below is the caliche where the majority of the gold is found
Snow on the nearby mountains
The Arkansas River is pretty low and mild before the Spring snow melt.
A view of the nearby "Fourteeners" from downtown Salida, CO... just a few miles North of Point Bar
These rock are from the highbanking operations that have been taking place at Point Bar
A few last notes. There is a public restroom in the park, but don’t expect to use it during the Winter or early Spring as it is locked up tight… Bring a port-a-john with you! Camping is allowed here, but be sure and have a fire pan if you plan on building a fire. Rules are rules and the Park rangers do enforce them.
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