Rabbit Creek
Claims
Placer and Lode Gold Mining Claims In Idaho
Rabbit Creek is an easy drive, about 12 miles outside the historic gold mining town of Idaho City. Located off the well maintained NF 327, I have accessed these mining claims in a 2WD car. Rabbit Creek has ample water for all kinds of possibilities. There are some old workings on the wide flats upstream of the claims, showing the rich values of deposits in this stream. Along these claims however, there aren’t the stacked rocks and tailings like you would typically see, from an area being gut punched…but with the equipment we have today, lots of working area and potential. Idaho City has full services, which again is only about a 20 to 30 minute drive from these claims. There are existing mining claims that encompass all up & down Rabbit Creek (abutting these claims to the east & west), and from the pictures illustrated in “Show me the Gold” (see below) & reports on the placers from the geological reports, it’s easy to understand how rich the prospects and potential is in here.
Show me the Gold
Where does the gold in Rabbit Creek come from? There are a couple vein workings on the North Fork Rabbit Creek (starts about a mile upstream of the claims). You can still see an old cabin on one site, and some tailings from some old mine dumps…gotta look carefully though, as the Forest Service has reclamated the sites. I have seen others selling claims on Rabbit Creek (a bit higher priced+fees), where names like Gambrinus mine, Mascot Mine, talking about the worthless details of any possible rock composition in a 20 mile radius…if you are savvy at all with maps, you would realize these far off mines had absolutely nothing to do with the drainage of Rabbit Creek or gold here, as they are in a completely different mountain range. Much of the rock composition on these claims is a granite base material, which makes working the bedrock a lot of fun with all that gold getting trapped up in the cracks.
http://www.idahogeology.org/services/minesandminerals/results.asp?switch=Reference&value=5804
We ran a test run for about an hour, just shoveling material into a high-banker and even with a simple quick test, still came up with some decent color…yep, awfully red from the garnet in the area. If I get more time over the summer, I was thinking of spending a couple days out here, see what the bedrock depth ranges at, and will post more pics of the color. We’ve already had one of the upper claims sale and another claim go pending (before we have had time to post these up), and the first buyer was tickled from finding 20 to 30 colors from some test pans he ran. I will also throw a hint out there, when running some sample pans on the South Fork on the Rabbit Gold claim, great color came up in that drainage too.
