We left Kernersville about 6am for the long drive down 85. The trip was uneventful other than having to stop and get some duct tape to hold the gold grabber together. The location we were testing has been on my radar screen for over a year and we had visited it on 4/19 to confirm that we had access and parking. It looks like you are entering private property that has no trespassing signs on the open gate and on trees on each side of the gravel road, but there is a public access site on the river maintained by Duke Power. I have no idea what is up with the gate or the no trespassing signs. Parking at the location is minimal and I will discuss that later. The signs state the access site closes at dark, but the only gate is the one up the road and you can tell that it never closes and if it did, it would block in a couple of homeowners. Camping has not been determined yet. We did see a fire ring, but no evidence of any campsites, but we also did not see anything that said "no camping".
Arrived about 8:30 and we had the place to ourselves so we backed as close to the feeder creek as possible so we could start unloading. Had to carry the dredge about 75 feet across rocks to get to the creek and once we got there we were able to float the dredge a short distance before having to pick it up again and go over some large exposed bedrock. We stopped at this location and did our first test hole. Decent gold came from the first hole, but we limited it to about 45 minutes before cleaning out and moving on. From this test sited we had to drag the dredge across loose flow sand for about 200 feet before lifting it up to cross more exposed bedrock and then on to open water. Once we hit the open water it was a lot easier to move around and we picked what looked like a good spot for the second test hole that we put about 1 hour into. The third location we tested was a natural riffle with a 4 food deep crack behind it, over all we dredged it about 2 hours before moving on the test hole number 4. I am not going to go into great detail about the gold we got from each test hole, but I will say that any location we decided to dredge showed decent to good gold.
Getting everything out was a backtrack of getting it in with the exception of about 75 pounds of cons. We were completely worn out by the time the last piece of equipment was loaded. During the time we were taking everything back up the feeder creek we had a brief encounter with Fish and Game Wardens. They asked how we did, but that was the extent of it and they in no way seemed concerned that we were there, nor did they ask any questions about our equipment.
Plus side of this location:
Good gold
potential for finding some gemstones
potential for finding some Indian artifacts
water is released well down river from where we were and had no bearing at all on our water levels
lots of exposed bedrock with nice cracks and crevices
Downsides:
Access sucks. You have the feeder creek or you have the option of carrying your dredge across a huge boulder field about 300 feet wide to hit the water.
This place got crowded after lunch time. We had 20 to 30 people fishing and 5 drinking
We were completely blocked in when we were ready to leave and had to wait on people to come back to the parking area so they could move their vehicles.
Fish and Game watch this place from up on the hill (I'm ok with that, but be on your best behavior)
Lots of the bedrock depressions are full of leaf debris. We dredged leaves for 30 minutes in one spot before we found any gravel
Unknown if camping is allowed
Equipment issues: putting this in here to remind everyone to maintain their gear and keep vital spares.
We had a blown o-ring on reg we were using making it difficult to get enough air
problems with worm drive clamps
holes in the suction hose
We left the jam clearing pipe in Kernersville
Dont drop your phones in a bucket that has about 1 inch of water in the bottom of it
Not sure what else to add, if anyone has any specific questions please fire away.
The mouth of the feeder creek is to the right of the large boulder in the background and you can see the exposed bedrock that the dredge has to be carried or dragged over
Looking downriver, notice how calm it is while just below us the water is rocking pretty good
