Weekend Prospectors : Finding Just a Little Gold Can Make Their Dream Pan Out

Lois Brown had caught gold fever. She had just discovered four little specks of the precious metal in the San Gabriel River.

“I’m going to put them on a shelf,” said the excited Brown, on vacation from Lee, Mass. “It’s better than paying $100 for a souvenir.”

Brown was one of about 800 people trying to strike it rich last weekend at the fourth Prospectors’ and Treasure Hunters’ Rendezvous at Follows Camp, about 15 miles north of Azusa in the Angeles National Forest.

For some, the search for gold was just for fun.

Like Brown, they were satisfied with finding hidden wealth that was worth less than the gas it cost to get to the site.

But for others, it was serious business.

Equipment Displayed

The main draw for both the amateur and professional prospectors was equipment on display or for sale that might make it easier to find the gold that eluded pioneers more than 100 years ago.

“It’s a hobby that you can work with,” said Patrick Keene, who owns a prospectors’ supply store in Northridge. “Some people get lucky. Some people find nuggets.”

The 63-acre camp, with 211 permanent residents and campsites for about 200 people, sits along the east fork of the San Gabriel River, with Mt. Baldy looming in the background.

Some of the residents live in restored red- and green-painted houses, made of rock and wood, that served as shacks for gold diggers in the late 1800s. Others live in mobile homes or small houses built among pear, plum and fig trees planted by the pioneers who first settled in the area in 1861 during the California gold rush.

$14-Million Lode

Joe Davison, 51, a former police officer and car dealer who purchased the camp in 1977, said pioneers had extracted about $14 million worth of gold from the mountains and river by the early 1900s.

The camp is now used for recreational purposes such as camping, picnicking, hiking, fishing and shooting.

Several times a year, Davison holds festivals, such as the prospectors’ show, when visitors are charged $2 a day to try their hand at finding gold.

Last weekend, dozens of RVs, trailers and tents lined the dry ground next to the river. Merchants, many of whom are members of prospectors’ clubs, tried to sell goods ranging from a $2 book to a $2,500 dredger. Other treasure hunters had their finds on sale from $3 to $300.

Many of the potential customers said they spent much of their vacation and leisure time traveling throughout California in their quest for gold.

“When that yellow comes out of that red dirt, that really gets you. Gold never comes easy, but it makes a good living,” said Pieter W. Heijdelaar, a blond Indiana Jones-type treasure hunter who lives in Australia and travels the globe searching for riches, including gold, pottery and coins. He was trying to sell some of the gold nuggets and coins he had found.

Heijdelaar, who was planning to fly back to Australia after the rendezvous, said that for the past four years he has searched for and sold buried treasure full time in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Europe.

“It’s a free life,” said Heijdelaar, who said he researches sites where treasures have been found and then examines them with a metal detector to pick up coins and other valuables that were left behind. In a nearby booth, such metal detectors were for sale.

Johnny Hemvree likes his gold-hunting hobby so much that he lives full time in Follows Camp.

“It’s one of the most interesting hobbies I ever had,” said the man better known to his friends as “Johnny Nuggets.”

“I try to hook everybody else. It’s beautiful when you turn that pan and turn some gold,” he said.

Found Several Nuggets

The tobacco-chewing Hemvree, who got his nickname after discovering several large nuggets, said he caught gold fever when talking to his friend Davison.

“I said there’s no gold in California. And he showed me the big nugget he had, and I said that’s (for me),” Hemvree said.

While many of the amateurs stood panning for gold in the river, the dealers, who paid $20 for a booth, stayed on dry ground trying to hawk metal detectors, metal pans, expensive motor-driven dredgers, other gold-mining tools, gold nuggets and books.

“Modern technology has come a long way from a burro and a pick and old prospectors,” Davison said.

Most of the people using the traditional method of panning for gold in the river were not too successful. Even the experts who used costly dredgers to scoop up sand and rock from the river bottom did not find much gold.

Mark Keene, who donned scuba gear to steer a dredger’s suction hose under the water, reported finding only about $20 to $40 worth of gold.

Tami Hagemeyer, 12, of Norwalk, who was on a family outing, suffered the same fate as many pioneers in the 1800s when she came up empty-handed.

“I tried for a few minutes, but I didn’t get anything, so I gave up,” she said, preferring to stand on the banks of the 15-foot-wide river watching the efforts of her 4-year-old brother, Joshua.

Even though Brown spent hours bending over to pan for gold, she collected just the four slivers, each about the size of an ant’s head.

“Nobody’s been as lucky as me today,” said the “almost-70” Brown, who came to the event with a relative who sells mining equipment.

Brown’s granddaughter, Nanci Arnold of Norwalk, could not believe the way her grandmother was behaving.

“I don’t think I’ll get to (leave),” Arnold said. “She found 50 cents’ worth of gold, and she’s going for it. Everyone else has given up, but not my grandmother. She’s real jazzed.”

Follows Camp, named for Ralph Follows, an Englishman who turned the site into a resort in 1896, was one of several camps established by pioneers along the east fork of the San Gabriel River. Some of those sites still exist today as campgrounds, including Camp Rincon and Williams Camp, just a little past Follows Camp on East Fork Road.

To get to Follows Camp, one travels up winding San Gabriel Canyon Road (Highway 39) about 10 miles and then turns east onto East Fork Road for another three miles.

There are enough bends in both roads to separate full-time residents from the smog and congestion below.

Most of the residents, including 17 children, commute to work and school in the San Gabriel Valley. With a wide range of professions--including truck driving, air-conditioning repair and engineering--the residents pool their talents to maintain their village.

Most recently, Davison got help in attaching cables to power lines to expand the area’s telephone and television service. Until then, the village had only one telephone (Davison’s) and could receive only two television stations.

Davison, who drives a restored 1953 Studebaker pickup truck, bought a cabin for vacations and weekends at the camp in the 1970s. In 1976, he purchased the camp, and ran it while he worked as general manager of a Newport Beach Rolls-Royce dealership.

But in 1980, the camp was ravaged by storms. Davison gave up his well-paying job to repair and restore the camp, and soon after began running it full time.

Davison, puffing on a cigarette, said he loved his new life in the mountains “except for payday.”

In his old job, he said, “I worked 80 hours a week. I didn’t hunt, I didn’t fish.”