Snowblind Claim
Gunnison County, Colorado
Gold
PLACER, 40 acres
$10,000
History
The legend of Snowblind Gulch begins in 1862 with a party of prospectors that found a rich gold placer in a small narrow gulch somewhere in the Sawatch Range and whip-sawed boards for flumes to direct water from a gulch to the east. For a few weeks the party sluiced a troy pound of gold per day from this small gulch! The five prospectors were quickly driven out by the Utes and three were killed a short distance to the east at the head of Deadman Gulch. One of the survivors experienced snow blindness during his trip back to civilization during a fall snowstorm, leading to the name Snowblind Gulch for their forgotten mining location.
In 1880, prospectors in the White Pine Mining District found evidence of early placer workings in a small gulch a few miles south of the camp. They found remains of a rough cabin, sluice boxes, old brass kettles and an old wagon, among other things. In 1881, one of the two surviving members of the original 1862 prospecting party, James W. Taylor, visited White Pine and confirmed that the small gulch placer was indeed Snowblind Gulch. He and a local miner named Morgan revisited the gulch and panned $2.15 in gold (1/10 ounce) in a few hours from the old placer cut. Although rich, the absence of water for sluicing in the gulch after the month of May significantly hampered development of the placer.
Beginning in 1882 several prominent local mining men filed placer claims in Snowblind Gulch and built an extensive series of dams to catch snow melt runoff. Starting in 1884, they worked for less than two weeks sluicing in the gulch during runoff while the water lasted. Each year between 1882 and 1892, these men worked in the gulch, recovering from ¾ to 1 ½ ounces of gold per man per day by sluicing.
Although a ditch from Tomichi Creek was surveyed in 1885 and some work prosecuted in 1888, the ditch was never completed. The men were also heavily involved with lode mining in the White Pine and Tomichi districts and spent most of their time, effort and capital developing these mines. By 1892 no further work appears to have occurred in Snowblind Gulch. In 2022 Outwest relocated the historic placer workings after an intense archival research effort and quickly staked the entire gulch.
Geology and Gold Potential
The gravels in Snowblind Gulch are extremely high grade. A visiting party in May 1884 tested the placer gravels in the working cut and found that each pan of gravel yielded ten to forty flakes of gold and that on bedrock, the gravel averaged >0.3 oz/yard. At the end of the day, the sluice runs were examined and thirty small nuggets ranging from 2 to 5 grains (0.1 to 0.3 grams) were collected from the sluice runs. In 1885, a mining engineer named James R. Gage was employed by the placer miners to evaluate the property. He found the entire thickness of gravel from grassroots to bedrock would average 0.05 ounces per cubic yard and individual pans taken on bedrock contained nearly that amount per pan! Gage estimated the average value of the last foot of gravel on bedrock was approximately 0.6 ounces per cubic yard!
Based on the scale of the surviving placer cuts and the volumes of washed gravel, it is likely that at least a few hundred ounces were recovered in the 1880’s by the miners. Considerably more gravel exists intact for several thousand feet upstream of the cuts, which could not be worked because of a lack of water, and for several thousand feet downstream due to the increasing depth to bedrock that could not be practically worked by miners with hand tools. Within the placer stretch of ~1,000 feet along the gulch, numerous small cuts exist in a haphazard manner, with tailings and stacked rock piles in disorganized piles. It is likely that considerable intact placer gravels exist even within the placered area given the chaotic manner in which it was mined.
Gold in Snowblind Gulch is generally coarse and not overly flattened and was referred to by the miners as “shot gold”. Many of the flakes are 2-4 mm in diameter. A few small nuggets up to 0.8 grams (0.025 ounces) were found. The gold has a very high fineness of 950 fine and some small nuggets contain considerable attached quartz. This gold likely has not traveled far from its original bedrock source, likely in several small, overlooked quartz veins in Precambrian granite a short distance upstream.
Gravels in Snowblind Gulch never exceeded five feet in depth and nearly all the gold was found resting on bedrock, which is a hard granite that is easily cleaned. Small crevices and fissures in the bedrock must have been exceedingly rich in spots. A small test pit measuring 4 feet by 2 feet was dug by Outwest geologists in an area of intact “side pay” next to the old placer cut. Gravels here were only three feet thick. A one cubic yard test was sluiced, producing 0.09 ounces of gold. Individual pans from the last material swept off bedrock yielded up to 12 flakes of gold per pan, including some coarse flakes up to 3 mm diameter.
Based on the size of the gulch and reported depths to bedrock, it is possible that 25,000 cubic yards of gravel remain in the lower and upper sections of the gulch along with 6,000 to 8,000 yards of erratically worked patchy intact gravels, side pay and tailings in the middle third of the gulch. At average grades ranging from 0.05 to 0.20 oz/yard, the gulch could reasonably be expected to hold 5,000 to 10,000 ounces of gold, with very rich pockets on bedrock. Much of the gold is coarse enough to be detected with a sensitive metal detector. Although water does not flow significantly after June, the creek bottom holds some water in pools fed from springs most of the year that could be recycled with a pump.