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.

As he was working near the extreme low end of the ground sluicing, I heard a yell through my headphones. Making my way down to him I could see the smile from a long distance.

We dug and extracted for two more hours. This time, as I dumped the concentrates, I saw a piece of gold three-fourths of an inch long and as big around as a pencil.

The old timers typically washed these areas down to bedrock, and some areas appear terraced. I would imagine this is because these hydraulic mines were generally where the miners found old Tertiary river channels on the sides of mountains that were gold-bearing.

The nugget sat there in plain sight, though it was covered in dirt, while hundreds of people had passed that way every day.