Gold fingerin'

Ian Wingfield / Staff Gold flakes in Roger P. Timm's pan attract the attention of Jerry Schultz, left, and George Volker.

Ian Wingfield / Staff AUsome! Gold Digger Roger P. Timm with nugget he found on earlier outing.

Timm pans for gold last month at Fish Canyon, near Sonoita, Ariz.-

Prospecting fever shows no sign of breaking among members of the Desert Gold Diggers

Gold fever takes hold of you and doesn't let go. And if you're lucky enough to find a nugget or panful of flakes, it tempers the heat for only a few days.

Then the fever hits again.

On a 160-acre mining claim called Great Hope No. 1, along a washboard dirt road near Sonoita, two members of the Desert Gold Diggers, a Tucson club devoted to recreational gold hunting, are exorcising their gold-sickness.

"He's a monster," says George Volker of his digging partner Roger P. Timm, who is muscling a bucking rototiller in the wash. "That guy is a horse."

Timm kills the rototiller and pushes it out of the 18-inch-deep hole.

"When I was young, I did that with a pick," the 75-year-old says, grinning.

They've cut a 2-foot-by-6-foot swath into the gravelly creek bed to reveal the gold-rich layers below the surface - pay dirt.

Then they shovel rock, dirt and sand into the Tim's Gold Extractor, a machine that Timm invented.

"It's absolutely the best," the 76-year-old Volker says of the machine, as Timm starts up its 2-horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine.

The Tim's extractor shakes the material they've dug, as water, from a 250-gallon waterbed mattress in Timm's truck bed, washes silt, sand and maybe gold down into a small tray. There it waits to be panned.

According to the Arizona Department of Mines and Mineral Resources, the recreational value of gold panning and small prospecting operations is "undoubtedly greater than the value of gold produced."

But that doesn't keep the 31,798 members of the Gold Prospectors Association of America from taking to the hills in search of oro, worth about $356 per troy ounce as of Thursday.

In Tucson, the Desert Gold Diggers have 280 member-families; the local Gold Prospectors Association chapter has 350 members, according to its president.

Minin' Gold, a recreational-gold-prospecting Web site, lists eight gold-prospecting clubs in Arizona. But the idea of recreational prospecting is somewhat of an oxymoron, given that prospectors sometimes sell their gold.

Bill Auby, a Bureau of Land Management geologist, said that very few recreational prospectors actually sell their gold. "It's a social gathering," he said. "They'll do some mining, and a few of them will actually find little bits. It's just pure fun." One Desert Gold Digger said that he has kept every ounce he has ever found.

In the first pan of the morning, Timm finds a nugget - a small nugget, but a nugget nevertheless. He's a veteran prospector, but it might as well be his first dig. The look on his face is salvation and innocent greed and awe.

That the find weighs only about 4 grams - Timm has an 81.6 gram, golf-ball-size nugget in his pocket - makes little difference. It's gold.

To those who don't quest for the yellow stuff, Timm says this: "You're missing half your life. "That's all that I worked for, so that I'd be able to do this when I retire. If I don't find any for a week or two, the fever goes up.

"I get downright ornery."

Last month, gold thirst hovered like dust over the January meeting of the Desert Gold Diggers. Something about the looks on the 100 or so faces, listening to a guest speaker, announced that they had it.

And when the speaker, bragging about his operation, said, "Call it gold fever, whatever you want - once it gets in, you can't get it out," everyone nodded.

Volker, the club claims director, and club President Jerry Schultz voiced their disapproval of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan because of its effects on some of the club's claims.

The Desert Gold Diggers, founded in 1982, has 20 claims around Tucson. Club members can prospect on any of them.

The club also meets at claims with names like Achy Breaky No. 1, Little Bruiser, Rough as a cob and Wishful Thinking No. 2 for monthly outings.

There's a dusty, hard-working quality to the gold-hungry crowd sitting in the VFW hall - they look ready to work for their metal. Some even wear rings on their fingers - badges of their years before the pan.

They're mostly men and mostly graying or grayed. And it's a soft, yellow metal that brings these modern-day forty-niners together.

* Contact reporter Anthony Broadman at 573-4124 or broadman@azstarnet.com.

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