he plans to make his entire living looking for and finding gold. Formerly the operator of an antique and pawn store in Idaho Springs, his business wasn’t making a profit and he had to close its doors.
“I’m going to dedicate this entire year, this is what I’m going to do,” Reid said. “I’m working a part-time job to get through the winter, but come springtime I’m going digging.”
Reid said that if he ever does come across a lot of gold, he would spend the money traveling the world and looking for more gold until he was broke again.
“This is no get-rich-quick scheme.” But for now, while the winter winds still tugged at the outside of his Man Cave and the drifts of snow collected outside the building, he’ll spend his time panning through buckets of dirt for more gold dust. Gold dust is what Reid finds the most of, adding that 90 percent of his gold weight is found in dust and little flakes.
“You’ll find pounds of that gold dust before you find a nugget,” he said. “But nuggets take a premium. You can get four or five times on a very characteristic piece of nugget gold.”
Removing and collecting such small pieces of gold requires tremendous patience. It’s a difficult pastime and he said people often don’t, or can’t, keep at it.
“A lot of people don’t last at it because it is so tedious,” he explained. “They want to run out and get all the big pieces of gold and think they’re going to go off skipping to the bank and get rich, rich, rich.”
He admitted some have stumbled across a big piece of gold or two—but often it’s the small stuff that provides a decent and regular payout. “Why would you want to throw away gold when it is here for the taking?”
He uses a dredge for most of his major gold operation during the summer, but he’s not ashamed to go back to using a gold pan.
“It all starts with a pan. I don’t care where you’re prospecting at—you’re not going to go in with a million-dollar track hoe and dig up gravel and say, ‘OK, there’s the gold,’” Reid said. “For anybody who’s prospecting, 90 percent of the people are using the pan.”
The idea is a beginner starts off with an affordable gold pan costing maybe $12 and then moves up in equipment as they find more gold.
“I started with a pan when I was a little kid and every year I just progressively added on,” Reid said, pointing to the various corners of the Man Cave. “Here we’ve got a screen over here, we’ve got a power crusher there, we’ve got a kiln there, we’ve got a magnetic separator there, we’ve got a vented hood for our assessor lab stuffed over here. There’s a shaker table and a power screener outside.”
But watching Reid use a gold pan is like watching someone who has mastered their craft. His technique is fast and efficient. The way he used the water to pull the rock and dirt from the pan is second nature. Soon all that was left behind was the fine, heavier magnetic material and gold.
It didn’t take him long before ultrabright flecks of gold started appearing amid the fine black sand consisting largely of iron and magnetite. He took a large magnet and moved it around inside the pan, pulling the black material out. Before long only a small line of yellow dust remained. He sucked up the gold dust and started again with another scoop of gravel. He submerged the pan in water, shook it, and let a wavelike motion of water remove the dirt.
He reached in with his massive fingers and removed the stones, tossing them aside. “Just like any trade, anybody can go out and buy a saw and a hammer and call themselves a carpenter, but it takes years and years of work to become a master carpenter.”
Reid said it is the same with gold panning. Again he reduced the rock and dirt to black sand in which several small flakes of yellow gold peered up at him through the dim and smoky light. “I find gold every day I look for it.”
Despite years of gold mining and prospecting, he stated all the gold hasn’t been removed from Clear Creek. Rather, erosion helps to replenish it every year.
“The gravel bed is always moving. If you actually look at the gravel bed, it is a flowing mass; it’s moving at glacial speed,” Reid said.
Helping Hand
Reid said he’s happy to share the stream with the summer recreational users. He added many times the rafting guides will see where he is in the water and try to steer around him. And in return he’s already in the water if someone falls out of a boat. He’s been in the right place and at the right time to help drag people from the stream.
“I’ve had people puking water on me if they’ve been in the water long enough. I’ve had people airlifted out of this valley that I’ve helped extricate out of this water. One day I took four people out.”
Rafters are not the only people using the county’s waterways. Reid said once the economy starts to suffer, people begin to look at the hills again and dream of gold.
“You get the rich investor who thinks he’s going to invest in a mine and he’s going to become richer. Then you’ve got the guy who can’t barely afford a sluice box, pan, or gas to get here. He comes out and he’s starving to death on the side of the river. If he stays off the goddamn bar stool and works hard—he can make good wages over the summer.”
People down on their luck have gone to Colorado’s streams looking for a second chance before Colorado was admitted to the Union in 1876 as the thirty-eighth state. During the 1930s a public works program was created in Denver to pair seasoned miners and prospectors with people who lost their jobs to the Great Depression. The program was profitable and gold panners claimed $1 per day from the South Platte River, which Clear Creek feeds into. It’s thought that the stream’s placer gold deposits weren’t cleaned out during the gold rush but by people trying to make a living during those lean years.
According to Reid, every year people come to him and ask where to go to find gold, and what it is they need to do to get it.
“There’s very few people who stick with it. This is the real gold fever—when you sit here and spend years chasing it.”
When Reid is working beneath the river, a six-hour day often feels double that.
“If you don’t like digging ditches at the surface, you’re not going to like it underwater much better,” he said. “If you look at your real successful treasure hunters, if you look at your real successful miners—they’re the people with perseverance.”
The Life Style
Over the years of rock wrestling and diving under the freezing waters Reid said he has “good days” and “really good days.”
“I’ve had days where it’s just been nothing but a fight all day long. Plug ups and rock jams, cave-ins, but you gotta do it,” Reid said. “But just like any job you have your good days and your bad days too. Good days in this job you can get rich fast.”
Admitting to spending every ounce of gold on trying to find more gold, Reid isn’t wealthy yet. He’s also not getting any younger and the work doesn’t get any easier, but he said he continues to descend into the water every year and put his safety at risk because it still gives him an adrenaline rush.
“You always want more and that’s the fever of it. Kind of like the successful businessman who wants to keep making more money. You just never know. Come springtime when I fire up that dredge
