Ben Parker is justifiably one of the heroes of the Colorado gold prospecting community. He was a student at Colorado School of Mines over 60 years ago. For his dissertation, he chose to create a compilation of ALL the information he could find about gold placer deposits across the state. He used original source material from every commercial gold mine he could find to build this giant summary document. This is a massive piece of work as you might guess.
Dr. Ben H. Parker, Jr. was born in Oklahoma but most of his school years were in Golden, Colorado where he eventually attended the Colorado School of Mines. He received his Geological Engineer degree in 1949, his Doctor of Science in Geology degree in 1961. His doctoral thesis “The Geology of the Gold Placers of Colorado,” is the most comprehensive document even published on the subject. He was both a registered Professional Engineer and Land Surveyor in Colorado and a Registered Geologist in California. In later years, he worked with the state of Colorado to publish a shorter version of his thesis that could be easily used by the casual prospector. The updated version of that book was a useful resource in making my first guidebook, even though it doesn’t address the legality of where you can dig.
Very recently, our friends at the Mines Library & Archives were able to get the original dissertation scanned into PDFs and have made it available online! That means we no longer have to settle for the short version of his research opus! For those interested in deep research, this material is a dream come true. Here’s his actual dissertation and supporting maps in PDFs directly from the Colorado School of Mines website http://hdl.handle.net/11124/14511. It is a staggering 600+ pages of written material with additional charts and maps.
One or two footnotes:
- His work ignores some areas that were never commercially developed.
- It also does nothing to let you know what is claimed, claimable, or may be private property now.
If you would like to know about more areas than just those commercially developed, and where it is legal to go digging today without concerns for private property or active mining claims, check out my prospecting guidebooks:
- Volume One: Finding Gold in Colorado: Prospector’s Edition
- Volume Two: Finding Gold in Colorado: The Wandering Prospector
I used his material and many other sources to identify over 450 public access, unclaimable, gold prospecting sites across the state of Colorado and then I put them all into books for you, the casual prospector. Enjoy and FIND YOUR GOLD!
