Rochford to Castleton... a prospector's view

A Saturday outing… we don’t get many of those but I’m recovering from tooth extraction and need to take it easy today. Bob is feeling pretty good after his surgery three weeks ago, so a drive in the Hills is just what the doctor ordered!  (Thanks to the higher powers for great weather... today we have a winter storm!)

Our first stop is for King’s pasties at Central City between Deadwood and Lead. These are traditional miner’s fare and the handiest take-along lunch we’ve found, not to mention good!


Rapid Creek is icing over

 We then travel toward Rochford, noticing that the recent snow tapers off a bit as we travel. That’s what we had hoped for -- depths drop from shin high to scattered snow cover as we proceed toward the central Hills. Rochford is quiet and very little traffic on the road this Thanksgiving weekend.

The advantage of winter prospecting is that leaves have fallen and sometimes the snow helps outline things you don’t notice otherwise. Today we see a gulch above our Rapid Creek claim has considerable placer workings, so we trek up the gulch a little and discuss next summer’s plans for the area. A nice piece of “float” appears to be conglomerate with fragments of quartz, schist and creek debris. That certainly justifies further prospecting next spring!

We proceed toward Mystic and just down the road see a man shoveling a pickup load of dirt into a sluice box. Some of these miners are hardy, but the price of gold gives new meaning to “pay dirt.” A day’s work right now can produce a lot more than pocket change!

The ghost town of Castleton looms, and we venture up the Castle Creek road. A large portion of this area is either private property or part of a protected withdrawn area. We observe how many old diggings, both lode and placer, that are not available for claim because of an abandoned campground! Such is the nature of government….

A few people are cutting Christmas trees… probably not a legitimate venture in this area!

We arrive at the old Lookout Mill on private property because I recalled some timbers still there, even though it appears to have burned several years ago. The mill site and several lots behind it are for sale and we speculate on buying land that remote from all our other claims. Hmmmm….

We venture back to the Rochford area. A quick stop for sampling at the Montezuma shows us that our paperwork and some posts have been removed, so that goes on our list of “things to do.” It’s a little icy in the area, so we don’t spend much time trying to walk on the snow-crusted rocks.

There’s one more area to check. Bob remembers some workings to the north he wants to investigate. We find them with no wrong turns, a pretty good feat on these forest trails! He samples those dumps, finding a piece of ore with a minute piece of crystalline gold! We try another trail we haven’t checked out yet. To our surprise, there are considerable workings about ¼ mile up that trail still on Forest Service property. A couple of hunters have the area staked out, so we’ll return another day to explore!