Hi everybody,

  For Labor Day Weekend, we headed to the San Gabriel Mountains in the Southern California area. The east fork river has been a hot spot for Gold since mining was invented. This rich Gold area should be a monument to Gold Miners

  Our trip was crazy, no parking, I couldn't go where I wanted to go. There were cars parked all the way down the road, so we ended up at 'nugget alley' if you're familiar with the area. There had to be 200 campers there, most on the river. 

The good:

We had nice weather, good BBQ, and some nice Gold. 

  I'm pretty good at reading the rocks for Gold, so we aimed for an inside bend that had gray rock with Quartz veins everywhere. That area has veins of dark black rock also. There are piles of Quartz on the outside bend, but I jumped in a big hole on the inside bend and got some good Gold, almost 0.8 of a gram of Gold.

The bad:

   Too many campers, rude campers, loud campers, etc. It was also a lot of hard work, and almost worth the lack of sleep from 200 campers everywhere on the river, and the (two) really loud Spanish (taco shop) music boom boxes until 3 frikkin' thirty. And I won't mention the very loud cars racing up & down the mountain...Next time I'll hike up river past the diapers, graffiti, trash, etc. The only reason I didn't is because all of the parking was full.

The ugly:

   Staying up river is preferable to seeing a 100 kids peeing down river...

Here's a few pics...