Late Spring

I know what you are thinking.  It’s almost June?  Why aren’t we mining yet?

I don’t know where this global ‘warming’ I was promised is, but I can tell you that doesn’t seem to be the case this year.  Its COLD.  Too cold, the ground is still frozen and there is still snow.  We had to plow our way in there just to get to our stockpile of paydirt. Add to that, recovery from a minor surgery and, yes, we’re running late this year.  My apologies.

I don’t have much more to share with you right now.  I did want to give a mighty shout out too our local trade school.  Our very talented and patient welder moved away last year and as usual we had broken a few things on the trommel last season.  Out of desperation I called the welding instructor at the technical school in Seward and offered to donate to their welding class if they could help me out.  Those kids fixed the trommel right in the parking lot on the last day of classes.  The charge?  All they would take was a box of Donuts!  That’s a good deal!

If you know a young person who’s looking for a career in the trades, I highly recommend AVTEC, I spent some time walking around while I was waiting for the repairs and it’s a great campus and they really seem to have a wide range of offerings – everything from renewable energy to cooking.

If you’ve been on our site lately, you may have noticed we’ve started carrying some prospecting supplies, I’ve been slowly adding them to the site.  Most of these will ship from the manufacturers warehouse for free right to you.  We don’t make much off them, just trying to help you guys out. If you are looking for a new sluice box or metal detector to use outside this summer check it out.  If you are looking for something we don’t have  let us know what you are interested in and I’ll see if can get you a good deal.

Somehow the gold isn’t all

First thing’s first.  I want to apologize for the lateness of this post.  We’ve been packed up for the season for sometime now, and knowing this was going to be the final post of the year, I wanted to put a positive spin on it.  I wanted something other than “well that sucked, and now its over.”  I wanted to tell you guys that we did eventually find the source of the great gold we were getting at the bottom of the cliff face, and show you photos of the sluice box and pans just piled with gold.

Yesterday, when reading my favorite poem, the ‘Spell of the Yukon’ by Robert Service,  I came across the following:

I wanted the gold, and I sought it; 
   I scrabbled and mucked like a slave. 
Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it; 
   I hurled my youth into a grave. 
I wanted the gold, and I got it— 
   Came out with a fortune last fall,—  
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it, 
   And somehow the gold isn’t all. 
I realized that this IS part of gold mining, and you guys would understand.
It’s not the GOLD that matters, it’s the STORY that does.  So here it goes.
Well that sucked, and now it’s over.
We continued to search for the source of the gold we’d found.  We studied maps, built roads, and dug test holes.  The rain that plagued us almost this entire season doubled down for the end of the summer, and we found ourselves spending most of our time getting stuck, getting unstuck, or repairing roads.
In one particular stroke of bad luck, a fallen tree got caught up in the track of the dozer, and got pushed right through the window of our new excavator parked nearby.  As I drove up on a four wheeler, I found my husband with his head in in hands.  He said, “it’s so hard not to get discouraged.”
It gets worse.  The next day, guess who came to visit?  Why, the friendly neighborhood MSHA inspector (mining safety and health administration), and this is what he saw.
 
For those of you that aren’t miners, you don’t know the fear that these four letters strike in the hearts of small miners.  While MSHA’s purpose is valid and honorable, mining safety laws are written for multi-million dollar operations, are up to the interpretation of the inspector, and are very subjective and difficult to understand.  As a small operator, compliance is almost impossible.
We lucked out. We got an inspector who was a pretty decent fellow; no tickets, but a laundry list of things to fix.
It was maybe a week later, my husband and I in the woods, in the rain, using a come-along and a tree to try to get the track back on the excavator, that’s when I knew we were done.  We had run out of steam, and it was time to call it for the season.
I don’t know what next season holds, we are too exhausted right now to make any plans.   While we settle in for the long winter, I’ll leave you with the last passage of that same poem.  Until next season!  God Bless.
There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting; 
   It’s luring me on as of old; 
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting 
   So much as just finding the gold. 
It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder, 
   It’s the forests where silence has lease; 
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder, 
   It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

looking for the source

In the last post I explained that while our new spot ended up having spectacular gold, but we soon learned that we were only getting material brought down by small springs over the top of a bedrock cliff.

For the last few weeks we’ve been working on finding the source of that gold on the ridge up above.  In the National Forest, we’re not allowed to simply blaze new trails whenever we feel like it.  We have to work our way through the forest, with as little damage as possible, dig test holes, then go back and apply for permits to build more trail.  Sounds simple enough? Its not. The forest is thick here, so thick you cant even really see what lies ahead of you until you get right up on it.

But we have been trying.  We spent part of a day stuck on a tree where the excavator slid sideways and pinned the tree between the track and blade.  We couldn’t cut the tree, we had to winch the excavator off by hand.

With the wash plant sitting idle, we have been digging holes, getting bucket samples, fill the hole in, and rinse-repeat.  Tedious and frustrating.  The crew’s morale has been low.  We even spent part of a day sneaking into our old dig site and running some of that dirt, just so we could remember what gold looks like.

 

 

I’m sure you are wondering, if there is still gold there, why are we spending time digging test holes?  It’s because we are almost out of paydirt in that spot, we need to identify a new dig site if we are going to continue mining, and we only have one summer to do it.  We can’t do both.

What makes matters worse is just digging a bucket sample isn’t enough.  We’re digging into ancient river benches, just because you dig one hole, doesn’t mean you’ve found the correct spot in the river channel.  You could be digging in the wrong side of a curve, or where the water was too fast to collect gold, or miss the channel completely by a few feet.

We’ve found a spot that we do have access to where the gravel looks good.  Its 100 feet away from the hot spot identified on the magnetometer survey, but we thought it was worth running a few yards through the trommel to see what happens when we get into the bench.  The returns so far have been disappointing, but seem to be improving as we get further into the formation.  Summer is waning, the kid will have to go back to school soon, but all we can do is keep trying.  Gold is where you find it after all.

Nothing is ever easy..

Last time, I kind of left you all wondering what kind of gold we were getting at our new spot.  Let me share with you what happened, and it’s nothing like I was expecting when I wrote the last post.

 

We started digging into the bottom of the hill at the new spot. Once we got the mudslide problem handled, we were able to start processing the material.  The returns were good. Really, really good.  The gold was bigger, and there was more of it.  We calculated the yield at more than 50 dollars a yard.  For those of you not in the mining business, to put this into perspective, consider that most commercial operations look material at least 15 dollars a yard to be considered profitable.  We were on top of the world, after 7 years, it looked like we had finally found what we had been searching for.  We bought an excavator. We started filling in our old dig.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long until we hit a wall, both literally and figuratively.

As we dug into the hill, we started to expose rotten slate bedrock.  This is not always a bad thing, sometimes the gold will work it’s way down into the cracks of the rock.  We even found a quartz vein in the wall; when we crushed the pieces and panned them there was gold in the pan.  However, more dirt we ran, the bigger that wall got in front of us, and the worse our cleanouts got worse.  The wall was now taller than the reach of the excavator.

We stopped and spent a day testing buckets all the types of material we were  seeing to try to see where the gold was coming from.  The tests showed that the gold was coming from the dirt on the top of the wall.  Our returns were good because we were digging in the stuff that had sloughed off from the top. Somehow, we had to get on top of it.

If I haven’t described the new spot to you, its a steep valley where multiple little springs run down from the top of the canyon wall.  These springs bring down tons of soil and rotten vegetation, and it’s sopping wet.  We spent a day trying to work our way up the hill, it only resulted in us pulling the track off the excavator and spending the rest of the day trying to put it back on in the mud.

We considered building some sort of ramp, but it would take weeks to haul the material to build it, and it would extend almost to the river.  Once we got up there, there would still be no way to maneuver.

I wish I could tell you that we figured it out, but we haven’t yet.  We DO know that there is probably only one way to do it.  We have to go back down the trail about a 1/4 mile and try to work our way up to the top of the valley through the woods.  In the National Forest, we are not simply allowed to drop the blade on the dozer and create trails wherever we need them.  It takes permits, time, and money to get approval for that kind of thing.  We will have to weave our way through the trees as we are not approved  to cut them.  If you’ve never walked through the forest in Alaska, you might not know that very rarely do you find that you can easily walk through the forest, there is usually a pretty thick underbrush.  if its hard to walk, imagine what it’s like to drive a tractor.

I’m home with internet to write you this because we had to make a trip back to town to get the new excavator welded.  The thumb on the excavator broke off along an old weld and it was more than we could fix in the field.

The plan is to attempt to get to the top this week, do some testing to see if we can find the source of that good gold, and then if we find it try to figure out how to get it down for processing.

I wish I could leave you with my usual optimism, but it’s hard to find right now.  We know there’s gold there, we are just not sure we are going to be able to reach it.  It’s starting to get dark in the evenings, its almost the end of July, and there’s no going back to our old spot at this point.

Incredibly frustrating, but that’s gold mining for you.

 

An unexpected road trip

Things are moving right along.  In the last post I shared with you the challenges of opening up our new excavation.  It’s nothing but mud, broken slate, and a pain in the neck.


With our new rock base, we we able to start testing the material.  It looked good, really good.  The gold is bigger, and there is more of it.  The only problem is, we could only dig into it with the excavator, which is also what we use to load the trommel.  Imagine the frustration of finding a spot that’s twice as good, but you can only run it half as fast!   We’d have to spend half the day staging, drive the excavator to the wash plant, and then spend half the day running material.

For some time we’d been considering another excavator, then our backhoe started exhibiting the same problems it spent all winter in the shop to resolve.  Decision made, we had to find an excavator.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned this.  We have never borrowed money to buy equipment.  As far as I’m concerned, debt is the main reason that miners fail.  You’ve got to be able to weather the breakdowns and the times the pay runs out without worrying how you’re going to make your next payment.  That philosophy though, does make buying equipment challenging, the used equipment available in Alaska is sparse, overpriced, and usually in need of repair.

What an adventure this search lead us on!  We took an atv ride to visit an excavator that had lived it’s life on the beach.  It ran perfectly, but we ultimately passed on it because the cab was nothing but rust.

Then around the campfire, searching craigslist on my phone, I saw it.  The exact model excavator as our beloved kubota.  We have a whole trailer full of spare parts for that model.  Only one problem, it was 500 miles away.

Alaskans are used to driving.  If you ask one how far to get from one city to another, you will usually get an answer in hours, not miles.  We were looking at at least 7 hours each way, hauling a trailer over mountain passes with no cell signal and virtually no services.


We left at 5 the next morning.  I forgot how beautiful the drive is.  We passed a glacier and several spectacular vistas.  We found the seller’s home and didn’t even haggle on the price.  It was perfect, it even had (sigh) an enclosed cab!

It took a while to close the deal, it turned out the owners were miners.  If there’s one thing miners like more than mining, it’s talking about mining.  Eventually, we bid them fairwell and headed back home.

It was a caffeine fueled, white-knuckle trip back.  My husband got us home at three in the morning.  I had long since become so tired I was not only seeing things, but hearing them too.


Armed with “cabbie”( as we named the new excavator to differentiate it from the other one) we were able to continually keep the washplant stockpiled and running.  When the choke on the trommel motor started rattling loose, we jammed a stick in it and kept running.

That’s probably enough for one post.  I’ll tell you about the cleanout next time.  In movies and in books I hate cliffhangers, but here I’m going to do it to you anyway.

After all, have to keep our readers coming back.  Thanks for following us!