History buffs, gold seekers treasure prospector club

By Cherry Sokoloski
North Forty News

Forget four-wheeling, dirt biking and boating for outdoor fun. The Rocky Mountain Prospectors & Treasure Hunters club provides the entire family with a hobby that's fun, sometimes profitable, and can still involve engines to tinker with--in the form of motorized gold dredges.

With the price of gold over $650 an ounce, that alone might entice folks to join this club, but members also enjoy finding old coins, bottles and relics from the Civil War, such as buttons from soldiers' uniforms.

"The majority of our members are history nuts," said Rick Mattingly of Loveland, who writes a newsletter for the club. They also like a good mystery and the thrill of finding something unusual. The club rewards that curiosity with "Find of the Month" and "Find of the Year" awards.

Established in 1996, the club boasts about 130 members, most from northern Colorado and southern Wyoming. Club members enjoy field trips, programs and demonstrations of gold panning and other prospecting techniques. Once a year the club hosts a silver coin hunt, a fun competition for both adults and children.

Out-of-town destinations include the Buena Vista Gold Rush Days and the Leadville Boom Days, a celebration that includes the state gold-panning championships. The club also travels to Civil War battlegrounds to find historical relics. Some Civil War relics are found in Colorado and Wyoming, since soldiers were stationed here to protect settlements from Indian attacks.

Most RMPTH members possess metal detectors, which can be used to find anything from coins to jewelry to gold deposits. Many have their own sluice boxes and gold pans, and a few own the motorized dredges for pulling gold out of streambeds.

Members call their hobby "ground fishing," and they enjoy getting a "bite" with that metal detector just as much as a stream fisherman does with a rod and reel.

"I don't know that there's anyone out there for the money," said Mattingly. "It's not the catching, it's the going: getting outdoors and enjoying the camaraderie. If you find something of value, that's the icing on the cake."

However, Mattingly and other members have found valuable items from time to time. Just last year, Mattingly was called to a site in western Colorado where a contractor was building a home. The contractor had already found a gold nugget and called upon Mattingly to help him "mine" the rest of the gold before the concrete floor was poured. Using metal detectors, the two found more than 60 ounces of gold nuggets.

Mattingly pointed out that nuggets, because of their collector value, are worth three to four times the "melt value" of gold. The biggest nugget he ever found weighed 4 1/2 ounces.

To hunt for gold, the club goes to spots such as Fox Park and the Lander area in Wyoming, or the Arkansas River between Leadville and Canñn City in Colorado. Some members own their own gold claims and allow fellow members to prospect with them.

Members have diverse methods for finding gold, including panning or using a hand sluice box. The motorized dredges have become popular because they're very thorough; they operate like a vacuum cleaner, pulling up water and all the loose material from a streambed. Then, the water runs over riffles in the dredge, where the gold separates out. "It's an ancient technique," noted Mattingly. Permits are required to operate motorized dredges.

Some people may think that all the gold in the hills has been found already, but Mattingly claims that isn't so. "Professional geologists think there's plenty of gold still out there," he said, and one of the ways to find it is with metal detectors. "You can find nuggets in high and dry places where the early prospectors didn't look," he stated. Metal detectors can find gold deposits buried up to a foot beneath the surface.

The best known gold deposit in Larimer County was in Manhattan, a gold rush town near Red Feather Lakes where the shiny stuff was discovered in 1886. The town even had a school at one point, but its vitality was short-lived.

The Rocky Mountain Prospectors & Treasure Hunters Club meets monthly between Fort Collins and Loveland. The next meeting is set for Sept. 5 at 7 p.m. For more information, call Paul Lange at 663-5776 or visit the club web site, www.rmpth.com.