I made it "out west" and did a little bit of hiking in the San Isabel National Forest. I'll have to check to see what the elevation is there, because it was quite a bit cooler than down in Canon City.
I have some pics I will upload in a bit.
Instead of following the hiking trail, I hiked along a dirt bike trail. The hiking trail is used by a lot of people walking on it, so anything of interest has been picked up long ago. People who use the dirt bike trail are not walking slowly, and not looking at the ground. As dirt bikes climb hills, the rear tires knock dirt loose, which then gets washed downhill into gullies and small "traps". This trail showed these traps full of black sand. So I scooped up enough to fill a one-gallon zip-loc freezer bag to bring home and test.
It will be a slow process. First, I will screen everything down to #50 mesh. That is where the mesh has 50 holes per inch, so each hole in the mesh is 1/50th of an inch (approx.) After checking the screen, I will carefully remove the black sand with a low-powered magnet. If you use a strong magnet, it will pull the sand up in clumps, which could trap gold. So slow and steady. Then the final step will be to pan off any light dust and look for visible gold. If none, then I dry it and look at it under the stereoscope at 40x magnification.
I will be surprised to find any gold in there. But there is a possibility that some micro gold is mixed in with the black sand.
OK, enough yammering... pics coming.