What’s the langwijj gonna be like, when Harverd has closed its door’s, and the depotment of eddikayshun has to sound out every word? And why isn’t it spelled “fonetix”? What’s another word for “thesaurus”, and how do you spell “I.Q.”?

Digging in the Wrong Place

—Or—How Close You Can Be, and Still Miss the Gold

I’ve been looking through some of the old photos from our mining claim, and I see it — plain as day, now — years later. It never occurred to me, but every shot shows it: they’re in the wrong place. Not by miles, but by yards. The irony of it just about knocks the wind out of me. All that backbreaking effort… misapplied by just a few shovels’ worth.

And it’s not that they didn’t try. They panned, they dug, they poked around. But you can tell from the angles in the photos — the place they chose was a comfortable little spot in a straight section of the riverbed. No brambles, no scrabble, no ankle-breaker rocks. Just a nice place to sit and swirl a pan of mud.

But gold doesn’t care about comfort.

If you know how to read a stream — really read it — you can spot the paydirt. It shows itself in the subtle twists and turns. The inside bends where the water slows and the heavier particles drop. The ancient banks where floods laid down layers of alluvial gold over centuries. Look close enough, and the land speaks.

They missed all that. Unfortunately, I didn’t see the obvious clues in the photos. Only now in retrospect do I see the visual clues that were there all the time.

They were working the surface scrapings. The powder on top. They didn’t go low enough. They didn’t trace the black sands, or follow the clues in the way the water eddies, or move the flat rocks and get down to the false bedrock and the bedrock itself. They didn’t do the homework — just plopped down where it felt easy.

And what gets me most is this: had I gone up there with the crew, I could’ve moved them a few feet and explained to them what to do in order to reach the bedrock, and that would have certainly changed the story. Just a nudge. That’s all it would’ve taken.

We were close. So close.

And that’s the real lesson. Not about gold — not the kind you can melt or weigh. I’m talking about how often we miss what’s right there because we’re not looking from the right place. Not listening to the flow. Not reading the bend.

It happens in mining, sure. But it happens in practice too. In daily life. In spiritual work. We dig where it feels easy, familiar, undisturbed. But the real treasure is just around the bend, under the silt, hiding behind that inconvenient thicket we didn’t feel like clearing.

But the gold is still there. Right where it always was. And now, we know better and we can presumably do better.

So you have the opportunity to work on a non-patented Placer Mining Gold Claim in Sierra County, California. The claim is the Yuba Sutter Placer #2 located near Sierra City on Highway 49.

There is an easy off-road access and a wondrous camping ground right next door to the property, with all the benefits of a full camping ground.

This is a federal mining claim and mineral deposits are protected by law. All mining activity on these and any other claims is prohibited unless permission is obtained by us.

There is are two streams and a river running through the property. You get about 1,000 feet of river frontage, located high up in the Sierra foothill gold country.

Description Specifics:

• The claim extends over 40 acres, easily accessed with 2-wheel drive vehicles, and there’s plenty of camping and play space.
• Good easy access to both creeks and the river.
• Good gravels directly over bedrock.
• Plenty of tree roots, downed branches, rocks and other areas of possible collection.
• Shallow to Medium deep water.
• Mining level currently recreational only — no commercial operations here.
• Area is quiet, safe, great for families. We go up there all the time.
• Children & Senior Friendly, and the local people are great!
• Enjoy panning, dry dredging, camping, rockhounding the great minerals, and getting to see the local wildlife at the terrific hotel down the road!
• Gas, Recharge, Lodging, food and bars are close enough, but not right on top of you.
• Plenty of water and plenty of parking and camping space.

===========================================================================

Gold mining by itself never pays more than survival and a tiny bit extra to cover gas and expenses, unless you get super-lucky, and most folks don’t. But with my “Plan A”, you are guaranteed to get SOME gold every time!

I’ll tell you all about that shortly…

Meanwhile, when you mine full-time, you live there, either in a cheap tent, or a luxurious inflatable 5-room luxury tent with heater, cook stove, frig, inflatable chair, inflatable couch, inflatable bed and all the luxury appointments you can find to cram in there, or you decide to live in an expensive home built right on the claim site, as one of our group leaders, Alan Powers, did, to the tune of $350,000 for an occasional usage on an unpatented claim, like ours.

His mine paid off very well,  but unfortunately the hired workers left one night, with the gold, to parts unknown. Our claim is very close to where his mine was located.

Of course, if you give up the claim, you lose the house, unless the claim is patented, and that’s a whole ball of wax right there, and that’s how Alan lost his home.

You can buy a working claim right below the Jurassic Gold Ledge today, for about $450,000.00 these days and it will be a paying mine, meaning it’s successful and they take out a few hundred ounces a day..

You’ll maybe be able to eke out a living day to day from the mine if you have an exposed ledge or outcropping, but you’ll never get that $450,000.00 back out of the mine anytime soon.

Working the mine full-time will cost more than you think, because you have to satisfy the BLM — that’s the Bureau of Land Management. You will also have the Environmental Protection Agency on your back and in your face ALL the time, and Federal Agencies, because they are SO INCONSISTENT, will drive you nuts and wish you hadn’t ever got started in the first place, and that’s the way they were BEFORE Trump and Musk started throwing monkey wrenches into the machinery.

Somehow, the Federal, County and City Agencies manage to find the most unpleasant and slavishly robotic zombies available on the job market, and then send them up to your claim to harass and annoy you until you slink away with your tail between your legs.

You will be visited and monitored by several more Federal, State and County Agencies, all interested in various aspects of your mining operation, unless you’re merely panning, in which case, nobody will give a damn what you do, as long as you don’t pollute the river while doing it.

I recommend just panning. Resist the urge to run a dredge or even a small backpacker sluice box. It just isn’t worth it. Pan, and have fun doing it. Don’t try to get rich — it doesn’t pay.

The Health Department, Fish & Game, Internal Revenue Service, you name it — everyone and anyone in government will be highly interested in any gold mining operation of any size whatsoever, and that includes private mines as well as corporate ones. It’s about money, but it’s also about the environment.

That means that NOTHING goes back into the river or stream once removed. You have to know how to work within that law, or you can get into serious trouble, meaning much more than merely being closed down. In California, Oregon, Washington and Colorado, you’re going to have to keep your environmental nose clean or else face serious consequences.

Cell phones don’t work up there, so you’ll need a pair of powerful CB walkie-talkies, good at a distance of about a mile. There’s no heating, no gas, no water and no electricity up there except what you bring with you, and the altitude might make you cold and dizzy. If you work the mine 12 to 14 hours a day during the mining season, from March 15 to August 15, you’ll be thoroughly ready to face civilization again and have a hot shower or steaming bath whenever you feel so inclined.

Even the softest and most comfortable inflatable bed will seem wonderful after a tenting experience, and air-conditioning, heating and lighting become precious when you’ve lived without them for several months of the year.

The advantages of living and working at the mine are clearly not comfort. Mining can be draining, exhausting and thoroughly disappointing, if you’re not hitting enough color to make it worth your while, and even if you’re pulling out an ounce a day — not bloody likely until you’re an expert … make that a LUCKY expert — you eventually will tire of the grind.

There’s a better way to make a GREAT living from a gold mine, and you can enjoy every minute of it! Only work the mine when you WANT to!!!

You need to make the mining operation strictly VOLUNTARY, meaning you don’t HAVE TO pull an ounce of gold out of the ground every day just to keep your financial head above water.

That means you’ll have to make money from the mine IRRESPECTIVE OF THE GOLD YOU FIND, meaning that the amount of gold you pull out of the mine won’t make any difference in your income, and that’s something hard to grasp, to wrap your mind around the concept and GET IT.

Plan “A”:

The very best solution is to bring the gold with you. Give people on-site little packets of real gold-bearing paydirt that’s guaranteed to have gold in it, because it was salted, added in deliberately — in addition to whatever gold might be in there naturally, and there will be some.

So let the workshop people try to find gold in the river or the two stream beds, and so what if they fail? They’re about to pan GUARANTEED  gold-bearing paydirt, and they WILL for SURE get SOME gold, which will give them a win! Nobody loses! Everybody wins a little, like in poker. That’s a joke.

Anyhow, there’s definitely gold in the gold-bearing paydirt, and they will feel like a winner when they pan it out. The less gold they lose, the better, and that’s what the catching tub is for — they can recover what they lost over the side, by panning the tub tailings.

Give them their choice of unsearched guaranteed gold-bearing paydirt from a dozen different mines, each one of which is a different source, and let them pan that somewhere along the river.

They’re guaranteed to get gold. Our paydirt can have anything from fines all the way to genuine tertiary channel nuggets, but one thing is sure — it WILL have some gold!

They can pan their gold-bearing paydirt anywhere they like, on any of a thousand comfortable boulders in the streams and along 1,000 feet or more of the Yuba River, or up on the high-bank over a plastic tub to catch what they might have missed.

Experienced panners won’t lose a single grain of gold, but new panners can easily let gold slip over the edge of the pan by, the spoonful.

Sure, when you charge workshop participants for the gold-bearing paydirt, they will have to pay for the paydirt, but it’s dirt and therefore cheap, and what’s more, there’s guaranteed to be gold in it, especially if you deal with a high-paying mine and you’re getting unsearched paydirt — there are still some legitimate miners who offer their paydirt to a few customers who can’t manage getting down to the mine on the river.

1 bag of paydirt, several pounds, is only $50.00. I go through two bags in a panning session, and generally get enough gold to make at least one locket, sometimes two or three, which brings in about $900.00, less the $100.00 buy-in of the paydirt, I’m ahead at least $800.00, which is a good return rate.

You can send for paydirt and pan at home, or buy a bag as a group, I pan it out on camera, and you share the result between everyone in the group, or…you tell me what you’d like to do. This would be within the context of a workshop.

I have had some really good “hits” from purchased paydirt. I found that nugget with a metal detector.

This way, you can work the gold claim whenever you want to with a workshop group, and everyone in the group can be certain of absolutely always getting at least a little gold from the experience. The gold pickers and flakes and even fines can be mounted in a beautiful gold-filled plain or fancy locket.

All you need is a GUARANTEED way to make money from the gold claim to justify spending many glorious and spiritually rewarding quiet hours searching for gold. With my PLAN “A”, you have just such a guarantee. You can’t lose. You get some gold every time, guaranteed.

I will show you how to work the mine at leisure, whenever you feel like it, without becoming a slave to the mining operation. It’s easy, simple, and you won’t live like a sweat-hog, and you can make plenty enough money doing it the FUN way!

===========================================================================

I’ll share with you the eBay listing that I answered to get this claim:

APPROXIMATE BORDERS NEAR ‘LINCOLN CREEK’ ON CALIFORNIA’S GOLD-FAMOUS HIGHWAY 49..
THE CLAIM IS GORGEOUS AS IS THE REGION ALONG THE YUBA RIVER HERE..THERE ARE AT LEAST 3 USFS CAMPGROUNDS NEARBY (WITHIN 3 MILES) AND SEVERAL PRIVATE CAMPGROUNDS NEAR HERE. THERE IS A SMALL STORE AT ”BASSETTS”, CA FOR MOST BASIC SUPPLIES JUST A COUPLE OF MILES AWAY AS WELL..

THERE MAY BE OLD LODE MINES NEAR HERE, OR ON THE CLAIM. YOU CAN BENEFIT FROM THE TAILINGS PILES LEFT BEHIND BY OUR PIONEER MINERS: BACK WHEN GOLD ONLY BROUGHT UNDER $20 PER CLEAN OUNCE, MUCH VERY GOOD ORE WOULD BE LEFT BEHIND OR USED AS FILL/ROAD PAVEMENT BY THE EARLY MINERS WHO HAD TO DECIDE TO TRANSPORT (BY MULE OR HORSE-DRAWN WAGONS, MOSTLY), ONLY THE VERY HIGHEST-GRADE ORE. NOWADAYS, AT OVER $1300.00 PER OUNCE, MUCH OF THE LEFT-BEHIND ”TAILINGS” ARE NOW VERY MUCH WORTH INVESTIGATING AND ARE QUITE RICH..ALSO, SEARCH FOR COLLECTABLE ITEMS LEFT BEHIND A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, LIKE PATENT MEDICINE BOTTLES AND EARLY (AND SOMETIMES QUITE INTERESTING) TOOLS..

THERE’S A VERY HIGH INCIDENCE OF GOLD RECOVERY HERE IN THE YUBA RIVER: YOU WON’T FIND ANYTHING IF YOU DON’T SADDLE UP & GO, MAY AS WELL GET THOSE NUGEETS AND GOLDEN MEMORIES INTO YOUR POCKETS. GOLD IS STILL SKY-HIGH RIGHT NOW: LAST TIME I LOOKED, THE PRICE OF GOLD WAS ACTUALLY HIGHER THAN PLATINUM!! (I CANNOT REMEMBER EVER SEEING THAT BEFORE..) DIG, SLUICE, DIG SOME MORE – BEDROCK IS THE WORD, PICK SPOTS WHERE THE WATER MIGHT HAVE SLOWED A BIT DURING SPRINGTIME HIGH WATERFLOW AND WHERE BEDROCK ISN’T TOO DEEP – GET DOWN TO THE ROCK & DON’T FORGET TO CREVICE!! YOU’LL BEGIN TO NOTICE TRENDS, HIT STREAKS & PRETTY SOON YOU’LL GET THE HANG OF IT & YOU’LL NOT WASTE TIME IN DRY HOLES ANYMORE..IT’S UP TO YOU HOW MUCH TIME YOU WANT TO INVEST IN THE MINE, BUT AS A RULE: THE MORE YOU WORK IT, THE BETTER YOUR SKILLS AND THE MORE GOLD YOU ARE GOING TO RECOVER TO PAY FOR THE CLAIM, THE GAS & SUPPLIES, THE TOOLS & EQUIPMENT. BUT THE EXCITEMENT OF FINDING REAL, CHUNKY GOLD ON YOUR VERY OWN MINING CLAIM CANNOT EASILY BE DESCRIBED: AKIN TO CATCHING A REALLY BIG FISH, EVERY NUGGET – BIG OR SMALL – THAT YOU RECOVER IN YOUR PROSPECTING IS…MONEY IN YOUR POCKETS!

===========================================================================

…and here’s something I saw at several craft fairs:

“KIOSK” OPERATIONS

If you set up a gold panning KIOSK somewhere in a shopping center or a mall or at a crafts fair or western fair, you’ll be able to sell the packets for double what you paid, and if you’re smart, you’ll stick with the $5 packet, because there are a lot of folks who just can’t pan gold, and will demand their money back. Don’t panic, merely process the tailings in the sluice box and put it in the glass collection vial with the rest or exchange it for more gold-bearing paydirt packets.

I’ve panned a few hundred small packets, and they never don’t have gold. I’ve even found a few unexpected nuggets — they don’t usually appear in a giant bag, but in a small bag, they stick right out as “pickers”, which you pick up with a tweezers, of course.

In a mall or fair operation, you’ll want your setup to be light, portable, easy to set up and even easier to take down, because at takedown time, you’ll be tired and you’ll want to get out of there and get a meal and some rest, so a complicated takedown is not a good solution.

Even in a public operation, it’s still a Shrine, but you can’t and shouldn’t insist that everyone who uses it knows and understands its sacred nature. If someone asks about the deeper meaning of the operation, of course feel free to explain it to them, but don’t feel obligated to make everyone understand AND ACCEPT the reality of what’s happening with the Offerings and what the Shrine really is, etc.

Keep your opinions to yourself and make it a fun and rewarding experience for those who come to your booth or kiosk. It’s just gold-panning for fun & profit, get it???

On this planet, there’s always that drive to recruit — to convert the Heathen to the Truth. This is entirely NOT the purpose of the Gold Panning Shrine. It’s to have FUN and at the same time, to get a little exposure to the Work, just a LITTLE, not a flood of information about what turns YOU on or an exposition about the trials and tribulations you have to endure while living your life.

Just let it be a simple gold-panning experience, and let go of the urge to make others look, feel and sound like yourself.

For most folks, it’s about feeling just a little better, keeping in mind what Official Federal Government Studies have indicated — that most workers are in pain most of the time.

Sometimes a spiritual action with some amount of power and significance can alleviate that “Angst”, or “World-Pain”, the pain of just being alive in an organic body.

=========================================================================

GOLD PANNING AS A MEDITATION EXERCISE

There is no better way to FORCE the concentration of attention than gold panning. Not only the attention, but the TYPE of attention is dictated by the necessities of correct gold panning.

1. You MUST watch to make certain that the gold does not spill over the side.
2. You MUST carefully and assiduously RESETTLE the contents of the pan.
3. You MUST nurse the lighter materials over the side without losing gold.
4. You MUST be alert for variations in tilt, angle or direction of pan riffles.
5. You MUST be aware of the PROCESS of separation of gold from gravel.
6. You MUST breathe and move properly to assure correct panning.
7. You MUST master the rotation of the hands with the pan in a perfect circle.
8. You MUST learn the exact “right height” of the pan under the water.
9. You MUST keep your attention locked in EVERY SECOND until the pan is done.
10. You MUST be constantly aware of nuggets or flakes the moment they appear.

Well, there you have it, the Ten Commandments of Gold Panning as Moses might have published, had he a website and a blog back in the day.

======================================================================

[VERSE 1]
I got a pouch full of dirt and a heart full o’ hope,
A plastic tub and a pan and some slippery slope,
They said “Bring the gold with ya,” and that’s what I done,
Salted sweet, with flakes in the sun!

[CHORUS]
🎵 You get gold every time, that’s the guarantee,
From a sacred old claim by the ol’ Yuba tree,
Whether fine dust, a picker, or a channel-born prize,
You’ll see gold sparkle right before your eyes! 🎵

[VERSE 2]
You can sit on a boulder or stand in the stream,
Let the water tell secrets, like a golden dream,
New hands might lose some, let the pay float by,
But the pros know the rhythm, and they work it dry.

[BRIDGE]
It ain’t just dirt, it’s a whisperin’ prayer,
Gold from the earth, like light in your hair,
Mount it in a locket, hold it to the sky,
Proof you were there when the claim ran high.

[CHORUS]
🎵 You get gold every time, that’s the workshop way,
Guaranteed bright bits in a golden array,
From a dozen blessed mines, sifted just right —
You’ll strike gold, day or night! 🎵

[TAG]
No sweat-hog mining, no backbreak blues,
Just quiet hours and the gold you choose.
When you work with the river and the Spirit inside…
You’ll find gold where the heart can’t hide.

========================================================================

Bardo bus now boarding, for video tour today!

========================================================================

See You At The Top!!!

gorby