FRIENDSHIP MAYBE MAYBE NOT

This claim has been worked pretty hard at the Center Entry point. If you are willing to walk upstream a bit, you may have a bit more luck. I dug along bedrock until I hit bottom and worked the clay deposit I found. There were a few small flakes caught in the clay. I washed some of the sand and found a few more. Nothing to brag about though. Still had a good time, not too hard to get to. Regular clearance SUV will get you there. Don't take Mom's Buick or you are going to owe her an oil pan.

First time at these two claims. GPS is spot on. Easy to get to, dirt road in good shape. Lots of cattle in the area and water for them in several spots. Dry area and a creek bed on the south west side that looks like most of the activity might be for panning. Did some metal detecting for a few hours. Did not find anything. Area is fairly clean of trash. Good to get out and enjoy the outdoors.

We got here in the evening to escape the summer heat. My brother and I set up camp and our highbanker recirculating sluice. Temperature cooled off nicely after sun set. Got up early and ran about 6 buckets of material from the gravel layer 4' up from the wash where someone else had prospected earlier. Found 6 grains of very fine gold. Check out Kentucky Camp while here. A lot of men prospected for gold during the great depression to feed their families. It's a few miles up the road.

Just a quick survey of the area to locate the claim and determine if it would be worth hauling all our gear out there. We first located the ingress point, which is exactly where the GPAA page says it is. I converted the DMS coordinates to Decimal Degrees (31.74559N, -110.71911W) and plugged them into Gaia GPS on my iPhone (download the map area first since cell service may be spotty in the area). The ingress point is at the southwest corner of the claim. To the west is another claim, which is marked with a yellow claim marker, to the east is this claim, which does not have a yellow marker - picture attached.

How can you properly prospect (ANY GPAA claim, for that matter) without knowing the claim boundaries? On April 10th, using a handheld GPS, we found the INGRESS point, where we found a NEW claim sign with the claim name: 'OLD PROSPECTOR'. There was a name & phone number on it, which we called. We were told we went too far, and to "go back EAST. There's a yellow sign with NO WRITING on it", which we never found. Unable to find ANY posts or markers for this claim, unsure of the claim boundaries, and not wanting to break any laws...after driving TWO DAYS to get here, we left without unpacking a single thing!!!