Category Archives: Glory hole

Working Weekend

With the kid back in school, we must finish our season with what time we can spare on weekend and holidays. This one cut short by yet more breakdowns and rain. The idler casters that keep the trommel from moving horizontally had to be replaced. We ripped the pull string out of our main pump, and to too it all off broke a steering hose on the backhoe.
Everything was a wet, muddy, soup. All those beautiful salmon we videoed last time are rotting in the creek. We had to be extra vigilant about bears.
We managed to pull it together in time to run a few hours until the dark made us stop. Yes it’s starting to get dark around 9:30 pm, really a hamper to mining. 🙂

Chunky Gold

It’s been a rough week.

Broke the coupler that connects the motor shaft to the trommel. Multiple trips back and forth to town. Rained so much we started thinking about building an ark. To top it all off, had a round of the flu.

After four days, the sun came out, we got the trommel back together, and had a perfect run.

Ran into some rotten bedrock. Started breaking it up and it is full of chunky, crystalline gold.

We even found a piece with quartz still attached. I never thought to find that in an area that experienced so much glacial activity. Guess I need to go back and give those quartz rocks in the tailing pile another look.

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Good gold

Guess what? Went all the way home to get the trailer, started to load the little tractor, discovered a stuck lever or the backhoe attachment that was stealing all the hydraulic power. Walla! Fixed. We were right about this hole, gold keeps getting better.

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Possible glory hole?

Been a while, have a lot of stuff to catch our readers up on.

Most importantly, the formation had presented us with a gift. If you look at the main picture you can see the uniform horizontal layers, but then, as you look lower, you can see they tilt at an angle. I know what you’re thinking, there must bee a depression in the bedrock there! I bet the gold settled there when the river used to run here! Sure enough, the bedrock is getting deeper, and the gold is getting better – chunkier and more of it. Too bad we can’t run any more of it because we broke the little tractor we use for loading the trommel. 🙁

Now we are taking a trip to town to get it fixed and that gold is just sitting there, singing to us.

Here’s what it looked like for the stuff we got to run before the tractor died.

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