Tag Archives: Exploration

What happens in the evenings?

We are going to try a post without a picture today.  At the end of the day, after all of our equipment has run out of fuel.   We perform our clean up, eat dinner, then it is time to sit around the fire and talk about events that took place during the day.  My Mother-in-law usually wants to do an evening exploration trip to an area of the mine we have not been to in a while.  When she heads out she usually takes my wife along with.   My father-in-law and I sit around the camp fire and discuss ways to modify our equipment to make it work better, places we think that we need to dig test holes.  We discuss how we are going to run the operation more efficiently with our small crew.   Once my mother-in-law and wife return from their expedition we will then start the wine tasting, the in laws make their own wine.  Most of the time it is great wine, sometimes you just have to spit it back out.  After a couple glasses of wine it is usually time for everyone to hit the hay for the evening, then rinse and repeat, we do it all again the next evening.

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!