Tag Archives: big horned beetle

A Harring, Whats a Harring?

GOLD, quarter, goldpan, mining

It seems that the story post I made was very popular so I think I will continue to tell the story of the mine through the magic of imagination.   As you all know we are looking for gold up here at Quartz creek Alaska.  What you don’t know is that the gold we find is found in smaller flatter pieces.  The gold was created a couple million years ago when glaciers covered this whole area. Well most people think that nothing can live in a glacier.  Well in this area the only place for things to live was either on or in the glaciers.  Glaciers are constantly moving and grinding up the rock it is moving across.   Because of this the glacier becomes embedded with minerals and very small pieces of the bedrock.  This was the source of food for a creature called a “Harring.”  The Harring looked like the cross between a big horned Beetle and an earth worm, the cross being that the earth worm had the horns kinda like the beetle. The Harring used its horns to borough through the glacier and find food as it went. It consumed the minerals and small rocks that it came across. Using the small rocks it would grind up the minerals for digestion. As the Harring digested, it only used from the minerals what its body needed, the rest was waste that would continue to pass through its body. One thing that I had not mentioned was that the Harring had its own heat source, a chemical reaction that would take place inside its body, as the remaining minerals passed through the body of the Harring it would pass through this chemical reaction, Changing the minerals into an new compound, before the waste minerals were expelled from its body.  This waste product is now valued for its beauty and rarity and people will go crazy trying to get at it.   It is what we now call GOLD!  The reason it is flat is because it had been carried through the glaciers for all those years and worn down to a flattened shape.   As the glaciers thawed the rivers carried the GOLD throughout the area depositing it in very randoms spots.  Sometimes you can get lucky and happen upon a concentration of it, but that does not happen very often.   In the picture above we performed a cleaned out after two hours of operating our wash plant.  There have never been any fossils found of the Harring since once they died the glacier took care of grinding them up to powder.