Prospectors, an Endangered Species? Page 3 of 6

Alaska stampeders —the old-timers I learned my trade from — knew long before H. Clinton, and the senator who was somehow involved in the collapse of a economically sound saving and loans system, came to fact-find about global warming by driving a FWD-SUV to a glacier reachable by road, that it took a man to experience the real Alaskan winters before the pipeline was built.

So what you don’t have a helicopter supported camp with a gourmet chef to keep up crew moral out in the middle of nowhere. That and the economics of scale, has created opportunity. If you are for real. Not the pot belly ATV prospector/BLM campground host as found outside of Quartzsite, Arizona, who needs to pack a .44 magnum as there have been sightings of “hostile” coyotes about. Have you ever heard the expression "shanks mare?"

The parts of Alaska that haven’t been locked up forever to mitigate the shame of people in Connecticut for dumping trash in their back yards, or to atone for the management of a New York co-op apartment building facing Central Park blasting apart, with a high pressure water-hose, an endangered species bird of prey nest, because they had followed the rules of nature by dining on pigeons— are really wide open, and reachable to good old-fashioned prospectors. In fact, it is an advantage that the lushness of Alaskan topography has totally reclaimed the early scratching by placer miners long forgotten.

I know of a dredge show in Northern California where a claim was cleaned to bedrock each and every year, only to be redeposited to the tune of $60,000 brought downstream by a winters flood. I also know that the improved return of something for effort brought about a better than wages vacation for a gold dredger smart enough to realize their was opportunity vacuuming the self-made pond where an inefficient bucket-line dredge had stopped working ground that had become unprofitable.