The Ditherer and I had planned a trip to see what all the fuss was about at Coles Bridge. Never having been there before we did as much research on the locale as we could thanks to you guys on the forum and some more research online, Google Earth, Six Maps, and of course poring over WalnLiz videos...
We did take some footage, and I'll make a short video of the trip. I still have the one-day visit to the Bridle Trail video to finish editing. I only just put up the last trip to Ophir from June on youtube a week or so ago.
Anyway, we arrived at Coles Bridge campsite not long before nightfall and set up camp, after some grub, I ducked off to a nearby hole in the ground and grabbed a panful of random wall.
I took this down the river and panned it by headlight... not bad - about 10-15 pieces of colour, some little 3d pinheads amongst them.
Satisfied that we at least had some gold that was obtainable, we went to bed.
Dawn broke on a stunning Monday morning on the creek. Not a cloud in the sky above us while the coast got a week of rain.
After brekkie, I took two pans and tested the same hole. This time one pan from the red river was on the upper layer, and one pan from the greyer clayier layer (try saying that with a mouth full of ungrateful moth's balls)
Interesting, the redder gravel conglomerate had almost nothing in it in that pan, the grey layer though showed about the same colour as I got the previous night. Hooray I thought.... in the dark last night I must've collected mostly grey layer.
So while the Ditherer (nursing a fresh minor facial abrasion) set up his once-more-modified "Hogwash", I gathered 3 buckets of material from the grey layer. Wow that material is hard.
We ran the material through the Hogwash (into a tailing test pan) and we got about about the equivalent of 4 pans worth from the previous night!.. 4...not 20 .... wtf...?
Our initial thought was that the highbanker wasn't catching all the gold, but the tailing test pan only contained one speck of fly-turd gold. There was a lot of clay in the material and the silt in the tailings was considerable.
So frustrated, we returned to the hole and did two more test pans. This time, one pan had no gold!, and the other had about a third of the previous night's gold.
We'd been outsmarted by a hole.
So we poked around looking for other locations.
The river was up just enough that it was above boot height and moving fairly swiftly, so I couldn't/wouldn't easily cross it. It was amazing to see the difference between the river as I saw it in January, and the river I saw a couple of days ago.
Just across the river from camp is a good looking stretch of bedrock, and we really wanted to explore up that way. The river made that impossible.
We took a drive to the other campsite upstream of the bridge and took a walk along the bank.
At the end of the first full day we had bugger all gold, though we'd had a look around at this new location and liked what we saw. We drove around, and found a paddock with an old open gate that I reckoned provided access to the crown land. It's a track on the way up the hill heading away from the Sofala Rd. The rusted sign on the gate said Bathurst PP Board (Pastures Protection) so we reckoned it was crown access. However, when we drove in a few hundred meters long the track across the paddock, we saw sheep in the top corner of the paddock. So we figured we must've made a mistake and turned around and left.....thinking now we were probably in the right spot..
Anyways, after some dinner and a sit by the campfire, the old man and I discussed the frustrations. If the river hadn't dropped by morning, the plan was to break some slate/silt stone and sweep out the holes.
Morning of the last full day:
We broke some decomposing slate/siltstone. We swept out the holes.... Specks.... hmmm
We looked at some other holes around the campsite. Looks like some hydraulicing had been done up there. Is that kosher? Looked like a "hosedown and dig out the slops" highbanking operation had been at work there. Looking at the size of the excavation compared to what I could do with a pick, it must've been hydrauliced?
We test panned a few other areas we could reach from the campsite side of the creek, Dithered a bit, and evenetually we decided that we didn't have any better option than to process material that we knew contained the flukey gold.
So I dug 10 buckets out, and the Ditherer shovelled it through the Hogwash.
The end result? As Wal says, if you go where everyone else goes, you get what everyone else gets..... bugger all.
At the end of that day, the clouds were gathering after two stunning days. We decided that rather than leave in the morning, we'd pack up our gear and leave that night. Drove until 2am before falling into my own bed exhausted. 2 days later, my forearms are still knackered from using the 6 foot bar to break the ground up for shovelling.
The picture above is the gold from 10 buckets full. Not good at all. None-the-less, a bad day digging for gold is better than a good day at work.
Looking forward to getting out there again. Hopefully we can get away from the campsite and get some better material. That all depends on the creek, time and money. And they all need to coincide.
We did take some footage, and I'll make a short video of the trip. I still have the one-day visit to the Bridle Trail video to finish editing. I only just put up the last trip to Ophir from June on youtube a week or so ago.
Anyway, we arrived at Coles Bridge campsite not long before nightfall and set up camp, after some grub, I ducked off to a nearby hole in the ground and grabbed a panful of random wall.
I took this down the river and panned it by headlight... not bad - about 10-15 pieces of colour, some little 3d pinheads amongst them.
Satisfied that we at least had some gold that was obtainable, we went to bed.
Dawn broke on a stunning Monday morning on the creek. Not a cloud in the sky above us while the coast got a week of rain.
After brekkie, I took two pans and tested the same hole. This time one pan from the red river was on the upper layer, and one pan from the greyer clayier layer (try saying that with a mouth full of ungrateful moth's balls)
Interesting, the redder gravel conglomerate had almost nothing in it in that pan, the grey layer though showed about the same colour as I got the previous night. Hooray I thought.... in the dark last night I must've collected mostly grey layer.
So while the Ditherer (nursing a fresh minor facial abrasion) set up his once-more-modified "Hogwash", I gathered 3 buckets of material from the grey layer. Wow that material is hard.
We ran the material through the Hogwash (into a tailing test pan) and we got about about the equivalent of 4 pans worth from the previous night!.. 4...not 20 .... wtf...?
Our initial thought was that the highbanker wasn't catching all the gold, but the tailing test pan only contained one speck of fly-turd gold. There was a lot of clay in the material and the silt in the tailings was considerable.
So frustrated, we returned to the hole and did two more test pans. This time, one pan had no gold!, and the other had about a third of the previous night's gold.
We'd been outsmarted by a hole.
So we poked around looking for other locations.
The river was up just enough that it was above boot height and moving fairly swiftly, so I couldn't/wouldn't easily cross it. It was amazing to see the difference between the river as I saw it in January, and the river I saw a couple of days ago.
Just across the river from camp is a good looking stretch of bedrock, and we really wanted to explore up that way. The river made that impossible.
We took a drive to the other campsite upstream of the bridge and took a walk along the bank.
At the end of the first full day we had bugger all gold, though we'd had a look around at this new location and liked what we saw. We drove around, and found a paddock with an old open gate that I reckoned provided access to the crown land. It's a track on the way up the hill heading away from the Sofala Rd. The rusted sign on the gate said Bathurst PP Board (Pastures Protection) so we reckoned it was crown access. However, when we drove in a few hundred meters long the track across the paddock, we saw sheep in the top corner of the paddock. So we figured we must've made a mistake and turned around and left.....thinking now we were probably in the right spot..
Anyways, after some dinner and a sit by the campfire, the old man and I discussed the frustrations. If the river hadn't dropped by morning, the plan was to break some slate/silt stone and sweep out the holes.
Morning of the last full day:
We broke some decomposing slate/siltstone. We swept out the holes.... Specks.... hmmm
We looked at some other holes around the campsite. Looks like some hydraulicing had been done up there. Is that kosher? Looked like a "hosedown and dig out the slops" highbanking operation had been at work there. Looking at the size of the excavation compared to what I could do with a pick, it must've been hydrauliced?
We test panned a few other areas we could reach from the campsite side of the creek, Dithered a bit, and evenetually we decided that we didn't have any better option than to process material that we knew contained the flukey gold.
So I dug 10 buckets out, and the Ditherer shovelled it through the Hogwash.
The end result? As Wal says, if you go where everyone else goes, you get what everyone else gets..... bugger all.
At the end of that day, the clouds were gathering after two stunning days. We decided that rather than leave in the morning, we'd pack up our gear and leave that night. Drove until 2am before falling into my own bed exhausted. 2 days later, my forearms are still knackered from using the 6 foot bar to break the ground up for shovelling.
The picture above is the gold from 10 buckets full. Not good at all. None-the-less, a bad day digging for gold is better than a good day at work.
Looking forward to getting out there again. Hopefully we can get away from the campsite and get some better material. That all depends on the creek, time and money. And they all need to coincide.
Everybody who goes there digs a few pans from there and when we first went there 20 years ago it was only the size of a rabbit hole. There was no gold in it then, and unfortunately after thousands if test pans from newcomers to the area, over many years, there's still no gold in it now. 8.( 
