I noticed an area which I could crawl through to keep going in a straight line. I got about three feet into the pile and Bob yelled for me to stop…

The dredge and our gear, with us clinging on to the sides, bounced along until it got hung up on a large boulder in the middle of the river.

As I laid in my Jeep and tried to get some rest, I began to realize how tired I was. I felt like a little kid who walked around Disneyland for 12 hours with his parents.

Saturday came and it looked to have the makings of a dreary, misty day. Undaunted, I loaded my truck with my sluice, buckets and gear, and headed for the claim.

Because waiting for spring seemed to be taking forever, my 15-year-old granddaughter Grace and I decided to pan for gold sooner. The thought was…even if we did not find any gold, we would set a new record for absurdity—gold panning in the coldest weather!

He got out his new salt gun and began searching for the source of the intruder. He soon isolated the sound to a point in the rafters above the stove.

I saw a big brown hind end of what at first I thought was an elk, about 75 yards away. I was standing behind a large tree and stopped and peeked around the tree to see what it was.