Tag Archives: digging

Fall Colors

img_0665-2 img_0657-2 img_0652_moment

mountains in fallI would enjoy the beauty of this time of year more, I think, if it didn’t make me so sad to realize its almost over.

Backhoe’s still in the shop, we’re making due with what we have.

img_0648-3

Besides, it means I get to spend a lot of time in the digsite manning the excavator. I love looking for big rocks, bedrock, clay layers and other things that spell good gold.  Every layer is a new possibility.  See that smile?

I have to be careful to pay attention and not get a huge overhang going, its easy to get to excited about a bedrock ledge or something and undercut too much.  Occasionally we have to knock it in.  Here’s a little video, I just love that slow motion feature on the iphone.

We’re almost to the little anomaly we saw on the mag survey, looks like we will have to move the caution fence soon!

img_0655_moment-2

All was well, until, you guessed it, we broke something.  A sharp piece of slate hiding in the mud popped a hole in the sidewall of the dumptruck tire.  Quite the sound it made.

img_0697-2 img_0675-2

Turned out we had to take off for a wedding so we had to clean out earlier than we normally would.  But the results weren’t bad.  Even found a few nice pickers, must have been under that big rock I was digging at.
img_0692-2

 

IMG_0572img_0693-2

 

 

 

 

 

 

Layers, Its All About the Layers

Layers, gravel, gold, mine,

This is a photo from the first hole we started digging in at the gold mine. You can see the different layers in the gravel very well. The almost black layer seems to have a large quantity of gold in it. Other locations that has deposits of gold are found are in the clay layer and in the fractured slate(bedrock). This hole was dug completely by hand, we used a Keene High banker to process the dirt from this hole and we pulled 3/4 of an ounce out of here.

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.

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.

Just a little father daughter time!

Here’s my daughter and me looking for that glory hole!  This spot did have a little gold but not enough to continue digging.  So we cleaned up the mess we made and moved on to the next speculation.  Lyra loves the tractor, she drives and operates it with a little help from dad, Sometimes we even just go for a cruse in it.
Notice the rag hanging from the Hydrolic cylinder on the excavator arm, I had a leak and the rag made it so the fluid would run into containment when it was sitting during the week.  There was a lot more wrong with the tractor so it went from the mine straight to the tractor doctor.  The parts list to repair this tractor was five pages long….Paying the bill was like passing a kidney stone.