West End Prospectors Corporation
PO Box 87 Norco, CA 92860-0087
www.wepcgold.com

How Did you Find the WEPC and start Prospecting for Gold your first time?
My gold prospecting started with my son Brian. He and I used to watch the GPAA show every Sunday morning.
Old Buzzard , George Massey would crawl into a cave or hike to a little stream and sure enough he would come up with a nice nugget in his gold pan. It looked so easy.
My boy Brian must have been 14 or 15 years old and that show sure gave him the gold fever. He ordered the GPAA membership with the gold pan, miners guide, snuffer bottle, sure fire panning methods tape and he even got a GPAA shoulder patch for his jacket.
Brian asked me to take him out to a gold claim and we tried several. The first attempt was in the Rand Mining district. I borrowed a puffer box from a friend and ran it for about a half hour before it froze up.
A friendly man who had been watching us showed us how to run the concentrates through a set of screens and then how to pan the material one screen at a time. We learned a lot but found no gold.
We tried a GPAA claim near Julian California. We had purchased our own drywasher. It was a small one powered by a small 2 cycle engine.
The claim was located in a deep canyon. We carried all our equipment all the way down a steep trail and by the time we got to the dry riverbed at the bottom of the canyon I was beat. Brian had pleanty of energy though and we eventually ran quite a bit of soil through our new drywasher.
We hauled all the equipment back up the trail but this time we had a 5 gallon bucket of concentrates to carry up that goat trail. About halfway up the trail some teenagers caught up with us. Seeing the load I was carrying and my obvious state of fatigue one of the boys grabbed the five gallon bucket and bolted to the top of the trail with it.
I caught up with Brian and the teenagers at the top of the trail I thanked them and we went home. We panned a handful of the sandy soil at a time but unfortunately didn't find any gold. Then one day we were in a local Prospection shop and the owner told us if we wanted to find some gold we had to go where it had been found before. He gave us some information about West End Prospectors Inc. He told us they were a good bunch of people and there was gold on their claims and suggested we attend the mext meeting. We did attend and I decided to buy a family membership.
The first outing we attended was a couple weeks later and it was in the desert north of Barstow California. Driving there I thought for sure we must be lost but sure enough we came around a corner and there were motor homes, trailers, pickups and tents.
We set up our tent and made ready for bed It sure got dark early in the winter and it sure was cold that night. We were befriended by a member who reminded me of a desert hermit or maybe a desert hippie , I'm not sure which. Anyway the next day he showed us where the best place would be to drywash. We set up the equipment and started throwing dirt.
I think I finally got tired and told Brian we were going to do a cleanout. We brushed the material off the riffle box into a plastic pan and Brian took it to the truck where We had set up the panning water.
I stayed behind to gas up the blower motor and prepare another pile of soil for processing. I didn't expect to have much luck in the small dry creek we were digging in. It seemed to have more rocks in it than soil. Then I saw Brian jogging down the slope toward me with a huge grin on his face.
He had a nice picker and several other smaller pieces of gold in a glass vial and he couldn't wait to tell me how the biggest one almost went over the last trap on the pan and into the brown water. I will never forget the look on his face and the excitement in his voice as he held up our first piece of gold.
I guess I don't have to tell you how we dug like an army of backhoes for the next couple of hours. We did find some more gold but that first piece, that first picker, was the most memorable one.

Tim Ketterer
President
WEPC