Tag Archives: bedrock

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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bedrock, outcropping, gold, quartz

One day we decided to take a break from digging and do some more exploring of the claim. We decide to walk up the mountain from where we were digging and found a large outcropping of bedrock. At first glance it did not look very significant, other than it was a large shelf with 75 feet exposed, it looked like a giant step. We walked around this outcropping inspecting is closer and as we started to pull the moss off of the face of the rock we uncovered a very large quartz vein with tons of stringers running all through the formation. We kept pulling off moss and kept uncovering more and more quartz. My mother-in-law found a loose piece of quartz and pulled it loose, it was a beautiful crystalline quartz specimen. We are very suspect that this quartz is the source for the gold we are currently finding, The plan is to send out a few grab samples for assay, wish us luck. Who love’s rocks…….I do! I do!

Dreams of finding “PAY DIRT!”

This is a photo of me in a sample hole I dug inspecting my handy work and collecting samples to run back at camp.  There was hardly any gold in this hole.  I found out later in the season that the reason I did not find any gold here was because I dug to deep/not deep enough.  The gold in this seems to be in one of two places, we find it sitting on a clay layer and we also find it sitting right on the bedrock.  This hole I dug just past the clay layer but not to the bedrock.