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Look what Santa brought

Hi everyone, look at our newest toy!  We won this on an eBay auction out of California.  We feel super lucky, it’s a one of a kind made by Titan Engineering, who builds 300 ton per hour trommels.  This is a smaller, portable version and should speed up our process.

Thanks to our family who went and got it from California.  Now we have to get it from their house in Arizona to Alaska, road trip anyone?

Exploration time

Since the forest service has us effectively shut down until we get our equipment back, we went back to the beginning and dug a few test holes.  Gotta have another spot lined up in case this one runs out.
Also we washed rocks and cleaned up the last little bit of the good stuff we had.

 

We used the homemade trommel and ran backhoe buckets full through it.  First hole, nothing, second we did find some color, doesn’t look like much but it is considering that we were not anywhere deep enough and it is only one backhoe bucket worth.  Hopefully you can see it in the picture.

 

 

Here is the kid holding a spruce grouse chick we almost stepped on, his mom was in the trees squeaking at us so we let him go and left the area for a while.

 

Yes that’s a nugget!!!

Because of our areas glacial history.  It’s pretty uncommon to find nuggets.  We get large flat flakes, yes, but no nuggets.  Near that big rock I featured in the last post, we found one!

Came in at a tenth of a gram, not a life changing nugget but maybe his big brother is in there somewhere.  Here’s the picture of our week total and you can see the nugget towards the bottom.