Placer and Lode Gold Mining Claims In Idaho
These following mining claims are positioned on the MF of the Payette River. The MF Payette is the main river that flows into the Payette River north of the Crouch & Garden Valley area, which if you are familiar with that area, is the road going up to Boiling Hot Springs, or Silver Creek Plunge. These claims are approximately 18 to 22 miles north of Crouch, in that beautiful scenic riverway. I could go into all the reasons why mining claims are sought after on the Payette, from the history, historic workings, color, etc. however, I don’t know that I could cover all the highlights and splendor this area has to hold. Yet as I know my words would not cover it all, and fall short, here are the things that stand out the most, which I think you would want me to point out: IDWR calls the MF Payette (for “most” of these mining claims, all but “Golden Dreams”) as open to dredging from June 30th to Sept 30th; as illustrated from the pictures and as many prospectors “look for” are great areas of exposed bedrock for sniping and crevicing for gold. Even when it is not “during” the dredging season, other prospecting methods such as crevicing/sniping, along with high-banking, sluicing, metal detecting, panning can all still be conducted. You can see from the samples below (under “Show me the GOLD”) at our methods and what we unearthed. There are full services in Crouch and Garden Valley (which is on the way to these mining claims).
Show me the Gold
These examples were from a couple minutes working small areas of some of these exposed bedrock areas on the claims. Typically we set up for around 4 hours with a high-banker combo, but from the exposed cracks, it wasn’t necessary to run that long to show evidence of our findings. While we could have recovered considerably more in short order, we only worked a 3’ to 5’ portion of one crack (at each location) just to provide evidence of the color, as we felt we should give the new owners who purchase these claims the thrill of the hunt to work them thoroughly. So even though the gold is easy to get to, we did not hammer any of these claims with our equipment, as we wanted to pass this on to you.
