Have you seen our tools?

 Here is a good front back and side view of our wash plant.  Antonio did an excellent job constructing this gold finding monster, he also made our trommel, bunk-house and he wrote another book(which is available on amazon) called “Talking Ice.”  All this he did last winter so we were ready for the next season of mining as soon as the ground had thawed.  We did not want to break it so we loaded the gravel very slowly most of the summer, till we found out that it can handle a full loader bucket from the Kubota.  After that we flat moved some dirt, Very useful tool!

I’m King of the World!!!

That is what my Daughter would be yelling out if she had ever seen that dreadfully long move Titanic.  This is when we first placed the wash plant.  Everyone wanted their pictures with it……..It was SO COOL! It is still super cool.  Anyone who wants to come up a visit we will take your picture with the wash plant too, free of charge.  It took a whole weekend with the 480D and Kubota to make a flat spot for the wash plant then a raised area for loading the wash plant.  There also had to be enough room to stage gravel to run in the wash plant, so the loading area had to be fairly large.  We had some trouble with the plywood restraining wall collapsing on the wash plant (It still worked was just a bit more of a pain to dig it out at the end of the season).  We will be constructing a steel retaining wall this winter for use next year.

To dig or not to dig?

Just down the hill from the Quartz vein that we found, it looks like at some point in time someone dug a very deep sample hole by hand.  Its a kinda creepy looking hole I was planning on digging it up next year with the backhoe to find out what the digger was chasing.  You don’t dig a hole that big by hand if your not finding anything.  It looks like one of those holes you would see in a scary movie, you know the cursed ones that everyone in the audience says don’t go in there stupid, and they do anyway.  Hopefully next season I will be able to report a mother load find in this spot, and not a Zombie.

Introductions and a Discovery

Here is a little introduction, from left to right, Me – Robert, Daughter – Lyra, Wife- Teri.  We are standing in front of an outcropping we discovered this summer with a large quarts vein running through it.  It looks like it may be the source for where we are currently finding gold.  We have taken grab samples from the vein and are going to have it assayed to find out what it contains.  Some of the samples had very nice quartz crystal development, Other samples we could see specks of gold in it, unfortunately the gold was to small to get a good picture of but I will post a picture of the crystalline quartz maybe next post.