Tom (founder of Tom Ashworth’s Prospectors Cache) was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He started prospecting for gold in 1978 using a home-built wooden sluice box and a gold pan. He didn’t know much about mining back then but had a lot of fun and caught a bad case of “GOLD FEVER.” So in 1982, Tom started dredging with a 3″ Keene gold dredge on the Gunnison River in Gunnison, Colorado. That dredge was used for years in some of Colorado’s and California’s best prospecting areas.