70 Degrees on Christmas Holiday Highbanking December 25, 2025

In today’s video, we are using my homemade high banker for the 300th time, at a relatively ok spot near Denver.
My goal is to run 1/4 yard of material to see what my equipment can catch. In earlier videos, I would try and see what less than a 1/4 yard could bring.

Previously on Prospecting in Colorado, I netted small totals from 6-8 buckets , only averaged 15-30 mg or so. Instead of poking around searching for a hotspot nearby, I dug down to about 4 feet in the stream bed to run the deepest material I could, but next time I will focus on finding and documenting the best pans before running.

This is a test, which grizzly bars get less clogged but don’t allow too big of rocks through, how often should one clean out, is a longer sluice run helpful or a waste of time, which mats hold the most gold after repeated cycles. The data is spotty like the god deposits, or I’m bad at this or both.

It seems like the mats hold onto a lot of gold, even if I shut down every two buckets and surge them they do great. The angles are probably fine, the grizzly bars made from edging stakes in a garden as opposed to the scrap expanded metal screen is a lot faster, but I can’t tell if that’s better or worse for the machine.

I clean out after every six buckets but I bet I could just clean the lower sluice run every 6 just to check I’m not losing much out the top, and don’t have to worry about tailings having much.

My paranoia is that the minute the really flaky light flour gold will float right off the top from the high flow, but I never have time to re run the tailings and I don’t think they have a lot from previous checks.

For every on off cycle, the gold surges out from drop riffle mats and travels down them, some people say, eventually dumping out the tail end of the sluicebox.

I haven’t seen this with the dream mats as far as I can tell, but perhaps I am wrong.
The way gold will build up in the mats make me think you could run them forever and the gold would just replace the less heavy material until it can’t hold anymore without needing emptying.

There’s a capacity to these little 6” sluices, but if you ran 1 full yard of paydirt I bet they could take it but shut down every 10 buckets and check.

I need to run more rich material, but right now even very poor ground, 50-100mg of 50-200 mesh size gold recovered per yard seems to be the total from this area. Everyone says there’s no point running material with less than .6-2 grams per yard, and they are right, but haven’t found ground I can dig that tests that high.

Test pans didn’t show nearly what I was expecting after the box was cleaned out and weighed. Each pan had 1-2 50-100 mesh flakes, but you can’t find pickers in every pan. I may have dug past the pay layer, or away from the paystreak because I have had better pans nearby.

I just can’t remember or record every pan to check where the best spots are, so it’s just blindly chasing gold and washing rocks.

I have to do all this in very little time, without any mentor or partner or experience really. It’s a grind, but I am living the dream, people say keep on dreaming and I say sure why not.

Gold may not pay the bills on these excursions, but it’s helpful to figure out where the best deposits are hiding for future reference purposes.

Видео 70 Degrees on Christmas Holiday Highbanking December 25, 2025 канала Prospecting In Colorado