Quote from: Northern Star Girl on Yesterday at 11:12:27 PMWhat is the back-story on "tits worth ditch" ? ?
How does that name tie into Gold Prospecting? I can only imagine.
It is a historical name. The source of the name Titsworth Ditch comes from the historic Titsworth family, early pioneers and landowners who homesteaded and farmed along Fourmile Creek (historically known as Oil Creek) just east of Cañon City, Colorado.
Like most historic irrigation structures in Colorado, the ditch was named after the local settlers who originally constructed it and appropriated its water rights to irrigate their crops, in this instance, hay fields. The ditch holds one of the most senior, historic water rights in the Arkansas River Basin, dating back to its original priority appropriation from 1861 to 1865.
It doesn't tie directly into prospecting. The area I plan to scout is further upstream along Four-Mile Creek, the source of water for those ditches. Four-Mile Creek extends all the way up into one of Colorado's richest gold mining districts at Cripple Creek. As gold was mined there, flash floods washed gold and tailings piles downstream.
My interest is in the geology involved. The creek follows a narrow limestone canyon until it opens up into the wider valley where the hay field and farms were/are. When the valley opens up, the water pressure drops and it loses energy. When that happens, the water lacks sufficient energy to carry heavy minerals, which drop out of the stream. That indicates that the area could be rich with gold, silver, and other heavy minerals. Since it is private land and without public access, I will have to look upstream in the canyon for accessible areas where gold may have been trapped in pockets.
The problem is that Shelf Road is blasted into the cliff walls, so access to the creek requires a long, steep descent I want to avoid. So the area I want to scout will be downstream of Shelf Road, probably aligned with
Nipple Mountain (which is to the east, closer to Phantom Canyon).
😁
