Nice start.  From what I know (admittedly very little), the Wallowa is not known as a big producer, but anything around the Eagle Caps is a good possibility.  More known production came from the SE area down around Halfway and Cornucopia.  If you can, screen your cons from the sluice through 50 and 100 mesh when panning them out.  Really helps with fines recovery.

 

Congrats! Very impressive and I can only hope to locate the gold as well.

Good find Mary

Nice

OK, Your on your way to riches beyond belief
No not the gold (but you never know), but the memories of finding your first real gold and all that will come there after

The more prospecting you do, the more you learn, the more you learn the more you find, the more you find the more you learn
A continuous circle

Enjoy your time in the field

Bill

nice job on the prospect, get some bigger equipment in there like a sluice and start mining the area to get more..

Congrats, and listen to what Arthur said. There is a great deal of fine gold that most people miss, I mean really fine, but it adds up quickly.

I pan my material down to where I see mostly black sands and then the little flakes on the corners. I then rotate the pan and try to get the rest of the blonds out, then I swirl looking for the pieces I can see to pick up with a snuffer bottle. Once I have gone through the heavies I rotate the pan and start over without the riffles and have a special bottle just to suck up the black sands. I then take those and dry them in the sun and once dry use a magnet in a ziplock back to pull up all the magnetics and set them aside for kids and adults alike to play with with magnets. But what remains behind is really fine flour gold and your hematite. Don't get rid of your black sands, depending on where you are they may be gold covered in iron sulfites and you just need to either buy a assaying equipment or send them to one.

I get more joy teaching kids and adults about the black sands then bothering to process them, but to each their own. One gentleman in our club said the blacksands we were retrieving were 37% gold but just covered in Iron, and that man worked the river harder then anybody I have ever met, practically a fish as much time he spent in there, and though he would never disclose how much he found he made enough money to have homes and claims in three states.

Hi Mary,

Congrats on the find.  

One thing I might add, and don't really know how significant it is, so take it with a grain of salt.

I have been in the Clearwater River area and another large river out of Lewiston, Idaho.  I have found extremely fine gold that is probably 100 mesh or finer, with not much material that's any larger.  My main message is that I seem to have better luck panning out the half cup or so of material with an 11 inch pan rather than with my 14 inch GPAA pan which is a good pan.  Maybe I'm too heavy handed with the larger pan and a little bit easier on the wash of the water over the material.  

My 2 cents.  

 

Wayne

Wow whats that green goo?

Not sure what you are referring to Leo. It's a green plastic gold pan and it's wet? This gold pan was never seasoned. The roughened surface was created by using it a lot. It's a drop bottom Garrett pan.
Thanks to all that commented. I was waiting to continue when I could include more pics of sluicing and results. Weather has not cooperated. River has been running a bit too high to run the LrTrap sluice box I bought abd cut the back out of for river sluicing.
I did dig deeper in that spot I got the two colors out of as those were picked up only two inches down, but with poor results. Out of a half buckey 1/4" classified dirt I found only two more small flakes.
Due to frequent flooding, the gold is appearring on the dry bank as the river goes back down and is leaving a lot of surface flood gold. Lots and lots of large heavy river gravel making it difficult to attempt to dig down to bedrock.
And it's getting dark very early here since I am so far north.
Now there is snow and ice so I'll pick up the effort again later on when weather improves.
I did go up towards the mouth of this river closer to the actual mountain runoff but no luck up there.
It's definitely fun finding wild gold for the first time, and this river isn't listed anywhere as being good for prospecting but I tried it anyway since this is a heavy gold mining area. I'm sure there are load sources up in the mountains washing down into this river. Nicest thing is it's public land and there are no claims...

Haha Ok...now that I went back and looked it again I see that could be a green pan. The first glance after looking at the 1 st picture threw me off.