Since the forest service has us effectively shut down until we get our equipment back, we went back to the beginning and dug a few test holes.  Gotta have another spot lined up in case this one runs out.

Also we washed rocks and cleaned up the last little bit of the good stuff we had.

 

We used the homemade trommel and ran backhoe buckets full through it.  First hole, nothing, second we did find some color, doesn’t look like much but it is considering that we were not anywhere deep enough and it is only one backhoe bucket worth.  Hopefully you can see it in the picture.

 

 

Here is the kid holding a spruce grouse chick we almost stepped on, his mom was in the trees squeaking at us so we let him go and left the area for a while.