sits a frontage road that winds along the canyon. Rusted and faded buildings from the area’s long-dead mining industry follow the road and litter the river’s banks on both sides. Beneath a steep, yellow mine-tailings dump south of Clear Creek squats an ancient shack overlooking the river.
It’s impossible to know how old the building is—suffice to say that it’s received attention at least once a decade. After the local stone and mortar walls went up, someone installed rough metal sheeting to its front and on the roof. And sometime in the last several years Ken Reid added a wooden sign that reads “Man Cave” above the shack’s door. The door is held shut with a massive rusty chain.
Reid is a big man, fifty-three-years-old with a giant black beard, perfect teeth, and a cowboy hat faded to where its color is potentially brownish. He talks in a voice so low, listeners often have to strain to reach its depths. He’s quick to share an earthshaking laugh, a bit of advice, or a hard-won lesson—and his blue eyes sparkle perpetually with gold fever. Ken Reid looks like he stepped out of a hundred-year-old sepia-toned photograph of the Old West.
“The Cave,” as he calls it, looks out over a large portion of his mineral claim along Clear Creek. He said it’s a spot that has earned him quite a bit of money over the years. A port-a-potty leans against one wall and behind it sits a generator, which he tugged on several times. It choked and rumbled to life, sending electricity to a handful of random lights dangling from the ceiling that flickered on and illuminated the building’s dark interior. Inside there’s a cast-iron stove in one corner that he periodically stoked with wood. The heat was just enough to scare off the worst of the cold, which creeps up from the river and slides down the mountain to meet at the metal shack. Outside it was twenty degrees, but inside it was almost warm, smelling of burning wood, generator exhaust, and cigarette smoke.
Around the room lay broken computer parts for rare mineral salvage, mining equipment, an assortment of chemicals, a beaten, brown leather chair—and a plastic tub resting on two upended buckets. Ken Reid is a full-time, professional gold prospector and one of the last to still earn a living from working the cold water and dirt of Clear Creek.
During the warmer months, he climbs into a well-worn wet suit and dives beneath the river’s famously strong currents—currents that, during the summer, often take several lives a year in rafting and other river-related accidents.
The stream collects water from melting snow as far back as the Continental Divide. Most of the year it is bitter cold and strong enough in places to pull a full-grown man off his feet.
It’s under that water where Reid sucks dirt and stone into the hose of his underwater dredge. Like a powerful vacuum cleaner, it pulls in rocks and other material, sorts through it, and returns the unwanted portion back to the stream. It is in the stuff left behind in his dredge that Reid finds the gold.
When winter comes blowing down Clear Creek, Reid packs up his equipment and brings his operation back indoors to the Cave. There he pans through some of the finer dirt he collected over the summer. The material rested in large tubs on the floor, located throughout the room. In that dirt was hidden the finest gold dust.
Reid said he tries to get into the water to go diving with his dredge as soon as he can but doesn’t dive in water during the winter—at least not anymore. Years ago he discovered a way to inject hot water into his wet suit so that he could go into the frozen waters, under the ice, and continue to operate his equipment. And for the first two days he said it was well worth his time.
“The third day I got out of the water, after about three and a half hours underwater, and a cold front had blown in,” Reid said, feeding more wood to the fire. “It was eighteen degrees outside and I had a wet suit flash freeze to my body. I was in trouble.”
Ken Reid is full of stories like this. Stories that elicit his conspiratorial laughter, as if you were there with him that unfortunate day, looking in horror at the amalgamation of flesh and wet suit. It turns out in this case, thankfully, he wasn’t far from a building with a fireplace and was able to free himself from the frozen suit. It was a mistake he would never make again.
So during the winter he now spends his time panning through the dirt and rock he collected over the warmer months. He poured water into the tub resting on the two buckets and filled a faded green gold pan with dirt and started panning.
No time wasted, Ken Reid is always prospecting. No fleck of the yellow metal is too small to evade his scrutinizing gaze. And he finds it regularly. He says he bought the Cave with the gold he found out in front of it. Looking for gold is what he’s done most of his life. And one day he plans to find the mother lode.
Squirrely
Reid said he has prospected for gold for forty-five years but admits he was less than successful during his early attempts. He grew up in Denver and was seven years old when his parents gave him a gold pan to keep him busy while they went fishing in the Rockies.
“I was always out fishing with the family, being out by the river and thinking, Hey, gold was found in this river and we’re fishing next to it. Why can’t we find gold today?” But he was searching for treasure long before then. Arrowheads, antique bottles—as a young kid he was always looking for something. Then he found gold and everything changed.
As a teenager he had a dream that he could go up into the mountains and make money simply by looking for gold. Reid bought an old van and drove up on the weekends and continued searching for the elusive metal.
“A little bit here and there, most of it was fool’s gold, a lot of mica,” Reid said. “Everything that sparkled was gold. The learning curve was very hard, until you can find somebody to take you under their wing and really show you what you’re doing.”
Reid went to prospecting stores located near a mall, long ago demolished, called Cinderella City. By talking to a few of the old-timers hanging out in the shops, he said he honed his obsession and gained the skills necessary to make it a reality. He was eighteen years old before he found anything substantial. When it happened he was near the City of Golden just west of Denver. That day he said he found enough gold to get him hooked for life. After that it was an evolution. His thought process turned from simply panning for gold to dredging for it.
To dredge for gold is to use a machine that removes sand and gravel from a streambed. The non-gold material is then sorted out and washed away. Reid now relies on suction dredging, which requires him to be in a wet suit at the bottom of a stream using a hose to pull in the gold-rich rock and dirt.
“How can I move more gravel material? It’s a game of volume,” Reid said. “I’m beyond the hobby stage. It is more of an obsession and, yes, I do make money at it.” He said his passion for finding gold has taken him all over the United States. During his best year he found $62,000 in gold in ninety days.
“I’ve paid for two pieces of property in gold dust and made my land payments in gold that I mined off the property,” he said with a degree of professional pride. Finding gold is hard; finding enough gold to make a living is near impossible. Reid is by all accounts very good at looking for gold and is obviously, and more importantly, good at retrieving it.
One year he came across a stretch of Clear Creek, not far from where George Jackson originally discovered gold on that snowy bank so many years before, which helped to bring about the gold rush. It’s the best place for finding gold that he’s ever seen, and he’s been working that area for the past twenty-five years.
Despite Clear Creek County’s history of a gold rush and eighty years of organized mining, Reid believes only 3 to 10 percent of the gold has ever been removed.
“We’re
