Prospecting equipment: gold pans

      We’ve stated before that we use different pans for different things, but any pan is better than no pan!

      Guess that would be our first guideline:  always have a pan available.  I don’t know how many times we’ve been out and about, not really planning on prospecting and found ourselves wishing we had anything we could use for a test pan!  I liken it to photography, in which I also have a little experience.  Always have a camera available because if you don’t…

      In the good old days J, the most readily available pans were steel pans.  Now a popular belief is that old-timers used their pan for everything from cooking to recovering gold.  The fault we find with this belief is that one of the most common gold-robbers is grease… whether it be an oily pan or greasy fingers from food. 

      We digress for a second to the subject of grease and gold.  Your hands, pan, sluice and any other mining equipment you might need should be grease-free.  Don’t have a greasy snack and go right to panning, and don’t wash your hands, utensils or dishes upstream from the sluice!

      Back to panning… These pans are bought looking pretty… shiny and all.  If you are “breaking in” a new pan, metal or plastic, they need to be roughed up with some water and gravel that will take off the factory finish and give you a pan that will actuary hold your gold, not send it on downstream.  New pans are pretty, good pans are the scuffed up ones. 

      Teresa finds a metal pan a real pain for one reason… they are rusty!  The rust rubs off on clothing (just try hiking into an area carrying a rusted pan and not get dirty), your hands and anything it comes into contact with!

      So our first preference is a plastic pan.  They come in a variety of sizes and shapes from different manufacturers.  They imcorporate molded riffles which are quite helpful but tend to vary with pan design. 

      Bob’s pan of choice is an older 14-inch green Garrett pan. The texture of the plastic is heavier and easier to control and grip.  The texture is also “rougher,” which keeps the gold in place in the pan.  The riffles are designed for easy elimination of “rough” material and gets you down to concentrates quickly.

Teresa’s first preference is a 12-inch pan from Keene Engineering (Keeneeng.com).  My hands are smaller and a 14-inch pan requires two hands to pan because of the weight.  I like the design of the riffles and a lighter-weight pan.  There’s times I pan a dozen or so pans in an outing and strength in my 5 ft. 1 in. frame is limited, to say the least!  I really like the riffle design in Bob’s Garrett pan, but again I’m two-handing it and tire quickly.

      For a test pan Teresa will use any pan available.  Highly portable because of their size are a quantity of cheap 10-1/2 inch black pans our daughter acquired a few years ago.  These are the pans you often see at pay-to-pan sites and you can actually get a fair quantity of material in them.  A test pan is just that… a test!  I always pan carefully, but once the material is saturated and the heavier materials have settled I can pan it out quickly to look for evidence of gold-bearing material.  This is indicated by black sands, nodules and bits of quartz.

      A friend of ours has what we call the “monster pan,” which holds a lot of material but is tiring to pan.  By the time you get to concentrates, you’re too tired to pan carefully.

      Andy, a follower of our website and blog, emailed to say,

"I use a 15" Garrett Super Sluice. It's a big boy, but I like it because the riffles are steep and have an inverted angle, its almost impossible to lose any worthwhile, gold in my opinion anyway.. (I've actually panned out gold in it that was light enough to float on the water surface! Might I add, for $10.95 and tax, it was a thrifty buy for the quality job it does!"

      We have no experience with some of the more trendy pans: square and hexagon shapes.  They come in a variety of colors, as do round pans.  We haven’t been motivated by the shape or the color to make an investment, but if someone wants to send us a free sample to try out, we’d be happy to comply!

      Andy's comment also made me think we hadn't mentioned anything about price!  Pans cost from $3.95 up to the $20 range... so if you calculate that you get a decent show in your first pan, YOU'VE PAID FOR IT!  That's what $1400/ounce gold prices return.

      The best way to get a good sample is to use a classifying sieve, or what we call “screens.”  This eliminates the larger rocks allowing more material in the pan.  We usually screen everything we put into the sluice box also, but that’s another blog…

      A snuffer bottle uses suction to remove gold from the pan.  Bob prefers using a snuffer bottle, I just transfer using my fingers.

      So if you’re a greenhorn looking for your first gold, we recommend bringing along rubber boots, a pan, a gold vial to display the gold you find, sieve, No. 10 shovel and maybe a rock pick, a 5-gallon bucket that doubles as a carrying device, drinking water and greasy snacks!  While you’re at it, bring along a sluice box because you’re all set up to sluice! 

     

     We’ll talk about our sluice boxes at a later date… happy panning!

Do you have a plan?

       This past week, as promised, we met with a ranger of the local U.S. Forest Service office.  It was a preliminary meeting to discuss our Plan of Operation for a small placer mining permit.

       

We were pleased that everything seemed to be in order for submittal, as we spent about ½ hour answering a few questions regarding where we plan to mine, what kind of equipment and our ideas on what constitutes an environmentally-friendly operation.  Bob’s experience in all aspects of large-scale mining is applicable to this project.  It doesn’t matter the size of the operation, the same principles apply… minimal disturbance, efficient reclamation, and a vigilant eye to maximizing production while minimizing impact.

        So we feel the meeting went well with some helpful comments from the ranger.  The permit will go to various parties for feedback in their area of expertise, with another meeting on the Plan of Operation in March.

        We’ll discuss in a future blog a comment by the ranger that parties are buying claims on Ebay, getting the impression they are real estate.   It’s something we find a common misconception that needs attention.

        So our permit is progressing and we have a “partner” whose role in this operation is developing the equipment we need for this small mining permit.  He’s been very busy building a trammel to process the gravel.  We’re pretty impressed with the result so far. 

When we started looking for equipment it was hard to find anything to process a small-scale operation.  A multitude of options were recreational scale, then jumped to 250-yard per hour equipment.

He has developed a grizzly to separate out large rock which will be reclaimed, the “ore” feeding into a multiple-stage trommel for various degrees of separation.  Black sands, which are plentiful, are mineral rich in this area and will be reserved as concentrates. 

It’s great to have a partner who has mastered so many of the trades necessary to fabricate equipment.  We’re anxious to see a demonstration once everything is in place!  Our partner plans to develop and sell these trommels, so drop us an email if you are interested…

        Our contact information can be found at http:/blackhillsgoldmines.com as well as mine photos, historical information, claim information… we’ve got it!

Permit me... permit you!

A February thaw is an unusual thing in the Black Hills.  We’ve experienced 50+ degrees over the weekend and the mild temperatures are expected to last until Thursday. 

Forecasts show us back to the 30 degree range for high temps after that, but us old-timers J know that by mid-February the brunt of the winter cold is behind us!

Now if you’ve ever spent a winter in the Black Hills, you are probably hooting and hollering, “Winter’s not over until April or May!”  You’re right about that… I was talking strictly about the days when the thermometer doesn’t reach “0” and Rusty, our prospecting truck, groans to a start even tho nobody wants to get up and go!

We’ve re-scheduled our appointment with the Forest Service because we were all homebound with the flu last week.  We’ll blog about our meeting next week and sorry for the inconvenience to both the Forest Service and our readers!

In the meantime, we are seeing a lot of interest in our permitting process… something we expected but maybe not to this extent??? We expected interest in general… after all I work in the public and having been in that position for most of my life, a lot of people know us and are interested in our personal life.  Most of this interest is in the vein of wanting to visit and see a small placer mining operation at work. We’re hoping to be able to provide that opportunity yet this season.

The next level of interest would be those who either want in on our operation or want to start one of their own!  The permit isn’t even public information (except for you all, of course!) and already we have multiple investors interested.  We hadn’t looked on the project as anything but a personal income source, so we’re a little baffled by who, what, when, where and why we would want to open the project to investors?

Small-scale, by our standards, would mean exactly what we are proposing.  That would be enough gold mined each year to provide an income and potentially fund the next year’s project.  We are middle-income people, living a middle-income life in a middle-income home in a middle-income neighborhood… our expectations are not grand or large-scale! Our ultimate goal is to retire comfortably in a middle-income style.

Can we help others get a permit?  No doubt about it!  Is their project a good candidate for a small-scale placer mine?  If you expect to get a mining permit to support disturbance in a creek… that probably would not happen for the approaching season.  Heavily timbered areas; run-off; water right; discharge permit; or designation as special, exceptional, critical or unique land can be a time-extensive permitting process.

These are issues addressed in a small-scale mining permit.  Interested? Contact us through http:/blackhillsgoldmines.com for more info!  We’re here to help with your permitting process based on our experience with this permit and the extensive help of a mining engineer and mining attorney.

Gold for the pickin'....

We talk a lot about placer mining because that is our recreation.  We spend an equal amount of time, however, searching for lode gold.

It’s a different type of prospecting, but employs the same basic principles… discovery, file a claim and mine the gold!

There is a tremendous amount of gold just lying on the forest floor waiting to be discovered.  Historically, the dirt and rock on the streets of Rochford panned out $300 worth of gold.  The source of the gold in that area is quartz and schist of the Rochford formation, mined at the Standby, Montezuma, Standard, Yellow Bird and King of the West mines, all following this geologic formation. 

Veins traverse the forest floor, erosion has worn the outcrops and you can find what is called “float” rock that has been liberated from this formation.  Not all quartz is gold bearing, but experimentation will tell you which is a gold bearing quartz.    

Processing is a more complex issue in lode mining.  The gold bearing ore must be crushed and then pulverized to a powder consistency to liberate the gold.  We have a friend interested in investing in a portable mill that would reduce the ore to concentrates.  It would be a very efficient way to sample and explore deposits to recover a little gold.  We’re recommending that he provide a service to claim holders to evaluate free-milling quartz ores.  It’s a service we would appreciate at our six lode claims.  In fact, when the weather breaks, we will collect a pickup load of ore from each and have him process it to determine gold quantities.

I guess our goal here is to dispute traditional thinking!  Homestake Mining Company and general publications on the minerals of the Black Hills have a history of discouraging lode mining, claiming that all the gold has been mined out!  About 9 out of 10 people we talk to make the same comment, “Homestake got all the gold!”

If that were the case, why are the placer creeks still being replenished annually?  If that were the case, why do we see what is obviously gold-bearing quartz at multiple locations? One answer to that question would be the current price of gold making mining much more feasible… when Homestake closed their Lead mine the price of gold was around $250 and cost of production about the same.  That does not constitute a profitable operation.  The cost of production has probably increased, but the price of gold has skyrocketed and doesn’t show sign of leveling off in the immediate future.

We highly recommend you prospect or employ us to prospect for lode gold before gold prices bring big mining companies back to the Black Hills.  The gold is there and we can prove it!