Just west of Golden, Colorado is a great area that is open to gold prospectors. It is called the Clear Creek Canyon Park and it has long been known to contain rich gold deposits. Men have been mining these waters for 150 years with considerable gold recovered in that time.
All sorts of activities are allowed within the park, and it is very popular with rafters, hikers, and mountain bikers. Most of them probably don’t even know that there is gold right under their feet! Let’s take a closer look at this popular gold prospecting area.
How to Get There
Getting to Clear Creek Canyon Park couldn’t be easier. It is just west of Golden along Highway 6. As soon as you leave Golden, you will see a sign indicating that you have entered the park. For roughly 10 miles you will have open access to Clear Creek. It is a narrow canyon road that crawls up a steep canyon, but parking is relatively good and you will have no trouble find spots to access the creek.
This is a very popular area for people in the Denver Metro area. It is probably one of the easiest spot to go if you want to get out of the city.
Gold in the Past
This part of the state has an exceptionally rich mining history. A few miles west of Clear Creek Canyon is Idaho Springs, the site of one of Colorado’s largest gold rushes. The first gold was found at the confluence of Chicago Creek and Clear Creek back in 1859. The rich placers in the Creek were worked for many miles of the creek, and after they played out rich lodes were discovered in the surrounding mountains.
The gold veins that eroded out of the hard rock are the source of the gold that you will pan out of Clear Creek. These veins were extensive, and led to the development of some of the richest mines in Colorado. Central City and Black Hawk became known as the “richest square mile on earth” because of the exceptionally rich ores.
Finding Gold Here
Clear Creek still has plenty of gold left to find. The earliest miners in the areas found some nice nuggets, but these days you are most likely to find much smaller bits of gold “dust.” Occasionally, prospectors will recover a decent “picker” sized flake of gold from Clear Creek, but I would suggest that you focus on the tiny gold if you want to be successful. There is a lot more of it!
Quality gear is necessary. Fine gold dust is notoriously difficult to capture so you will want to get the best equipment of the job. If you want to keep it simple then you can certainly just use some basic equipment like a shovel and a gold pan. You will need to be patient use a very careful technique to recover those tiny specks of gold from the black sands.
If you really want to recover some decent gold then you will want to size up your equipment. Everyone has their favorites, but as far as I am concerned the best thing out there for catching really tiny gold is the Gold Cube. It does cost a few hundred dollars, but you will find a lot more gold using it than you will with just a gold pan alone.
Access
As I mentioned before, access is really good since the Highway runs right along the creek. There is also a good trail system that accesses the other side of Clear Creek within much of the canyon, so if you are willing to hike you can get pretty much anywhere you want to.
Of course some areas are richer than others, and finding those good spots is what prospecting is all about. If you find the right spot it is possible to find a decent amount of gold in a hard days work.
More on Colorado Gold:
Richest Counties for Mining in Colorado
Gold Panning in Ouray & Telluride
Colorado’s Smuggler Mine and Historic Silver Discovery