Whispers of gold...

One questions we get a lot… how to get to what the old-timers found?

I’ve tried to explain this verbally and always seem to fall short. I recently took a photo of an old open cut which will help, I think?

First of all, this placer pit was pushed out with equipment, probably a dozer, sometime in the last 50 or so years. So it was originally a vertical on each side, which I will roughly represent as |____|. As time passed, it eroded to more of a \____/ configuration as shown by my chicken scratching in the photo.

What did they find? We were pretty excited to see, at one end, a pile of river washed gravel! Maybe I should explain that we had hiked up a hill to explore, hoping to find a high bench gravel commonly referred to historically.

The old timers really whispered in our ear on that one, like they had left us a clue to what was in store!

Now how to go about finding what they found at the bottom of the pit? I show an arrow pointing down, indicating that whatever they exposed in the bottom of the cut will give you another clue. Dig down… chances are they exposed bedrock in the bottom of the cut. It’s going to be your call, by sampling and observation, whether they cleaned the bedrock or left you something to represent the ore they exposed. In this instance, chances are they mechanically pushed out the ore and did not manually clean up what was left. Nice of them to leave you that little bonanza, huh?

Cleaned or not, you eventually want to expose the original cut to see the gravel bands that they saw. So now start removing overburden on the floor of the pit toward the original highwall, restoring it to more of a \____|. This exposed highwall will display the gravel bands, allowing you to sample and find out if there was only gold on bedrock or if multiple pay zones exist.

This method works on any old workings, especially manual digging. You can bet those old timers didn’t waste energy digging any deeper than they had to, but by the same token they didn’t stop digging until they ran out of gold!

Bob sometimes jokes about the really old diggings that we encounter, saying “this must have been a left-handed miner!” Have you ever noticed that waste material on those diggings is usually thrown to one side or another? Consistent shoveling is efficient shoveling, so the miner threw material to one side or the other depending on whether he was right- or left-handed!

So whether you believe in ghost miners or not, the “whispers” are there in evidence of what they did and how they did it. Listen… whether it’s with your ear or mental logic!