Finding Gold in Colorado Historic Sites & Modern Prospecting Honey Holes

Point Barr Prospecting Site on the Arkansas River

Point Barr Site Map

Point Barr is unclaimable land on the Arkansas River where you can drive right to the riverside and get to digging!

The gold here is the typical fine Arkansas River material. This means fairly consistent in size – small! This means it would be the ideal place to run a Gold Cube; read about that prospecting tool here:

https://findinggoldincolorado.com/using-a-gold-cube-in-colorado/

Prospecting at Point Barr

As you can guess from the map of the 37-acre site above (almost as big as two mining claims!), there’s plenty of river to work here and plenty of dry camping space too. The BLM allows dry camping which means you have to bring everything you need and pack it all out too. There is a fee to spend the night ($28 as of the time of writing in June 2020).

The tricky part is access. Coming west on Highway 50 from Pueblo, the turnoff to Point Barr takes you to a road that runs along the water at times. When the water is high this road can be closed or sketchy…even when the water isn’t high, 4WD is always recommended and high clearance is always required. If you don’t know what “high clearance” means, you have the wrong vehicle and should approach from the upstream side instead. Expect high water in June, July, and the first half of August due to runoff as the high mountain snows melt and water levels are kept artificially high to support the rafting industry.

Driving east from Salida is easier with a decent road the whole way. From Highway 50, here’s the sign to look for near Wellsville:

The street sign visible from the highway at the turnoff to Wellsville
The upstream end of the public prospecting area.

Anyway, as you can see the borders of the public mining area are well marked. There are private claims just upstream and downstream so please do look for the signs 🙂

There’s a sign with rules on site. I’ve also included the link below to my prior article which will get you to the BLM info pages on this site (as well as many other places you are welcome to dig!).

Note: you will variously see this site called “Point Bar” and Point Barr”. I have chosen the latter name since it is more unique…there are lots of point bars in lots of rivers but only this Point Barr.

Related post: another public location fairly nearby: https://findinggoldincolorado.com/cache-creek-prospecting-site/

And there is a whole list of public dig sites with driving instructions and so on in my article here. If that isn’t enough for you, I recommend my gold prospecting guide book with over 180 public access gold prospecting sites!!

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