Shade tree prospecting

        Summer is here, with temps last weekend in the 80s and 90s.  That’s perfect weather for sluicing, but we wanted to do some sampling at our hard-rock mines and it worked well for that also.



Alex rides shotgun over Treasuure Coach.



        Saturday we visited three mines.  We’ll kindof take them one at a time. 

The first is a dry placer mine we’ve chanced (through Bob’s diligence) upon.  It could be either a placer or lode, having both properties, but we’ve staked it as a placer for a possible exploration permit in that context. Research shows this mine, adjacent to a privately owned lode, was prospected to have placer gravels: “free gold can be panned from the rock and dirt on this hill.”

        We used the research and Bob’s map to “get acquainted” with the property, familiarize ourselves with the private property boundaries, and do some testing.  These old mine sites are dangerous, so we cautiously explored the old workings and tried to pinpoint “this hill.” We collected two classified buckets of placer gravel to test at home, since no water was immediately available and we wanted a decent quantity for a test.  We stopped at a small pond of water en route to the next mine and were pleased to see some black sands in test pans.

        Our next stop was a lode claim located for a friend.  He was along and we grabbed several buckets of samples off a dump.  Extensive workings also exist on this claim, with an adit, several open cuts, and a huge glory hole.

        Our final stop was one of our claimed lodes, taking more extensive samples for what has been reported to be 1/3 ounce ore.  These three locations are all new to our friend and we had a lot of fun exploring and explaining!



crushed ore



        The dirty work is yet to come though.  Sunday morning we met up to crush the ore we had sampled.  First through the jaw crusher which takes it down to about 5/8 inch, then through the cone which reduced it further to approx. grain size.  We kept the ores segregated to test individually.

        We then headed home to do some “shade tree” prospecting under a huge oak tree in our yard! 

        I looked like a crusher hand by the time we classified all the crushed rock.  The oversize went back into the sample bags awaiting pulverization.

        By the way… we cannot get a true representation of ore unless we can find a pulverizer, stamp or roller mill.  Does anyone out there know of one available for sale or custom milling? 

        The approx. 50 lbs. of material from the first mine sluiced out some flour gold and a very small piece attached to quartz.  That certainly supports the reported 1/3 ounce per ton and we have unpulverized material still to be reduced!

        Next we sluiced out the placer gravels and found at least one small piece of gold there, with nice black sands.

        The final ore from the second mine has yet to be sluiced… another day, same shade tree!

        You all should be thinking about free-milling quartz lode claims…

        Wednesday we got out to placer mine in temps that hovered in the 50s, but we stayed warm shoveling and had a couple of new guests to help out!  The return was excellent and we had an opportunity to put our concentrates through a spiral pan to help eliminate black sands.  It certainly did the trick, taking our concentrates from 1/3 pan to 2 tablespoons of material and showing off the very nice gold we recovered!

         We like to ramble on... anything you want us to ramble about?  Drop us an email; especially if you have some resolution to our pulverizing problem!