Tag Archives: family

The Mountains are Calling..

“The mountains are calling, and I must go.” –   John Muir

Welcome to the start of the 2017 Alaska mining season!  To those of you just joining our story, we are a family of gold miners from Alaska.  For some reason that I will never understand, folks like to hear about our trials and tribulations while trying to dig our fortune out of the ground.  For those of you who have followed us in the past, thanks for tuning in again!

I understand what Muir was saying about the call of the mountains – I’ve been hearing it for some time, though the snow didn’t seem to be cooperating.  Thankfully though, Spring is finally upon us and its time to start setting up.  First piece of equipment – the recently repaired backhoe- is on site.

While there is still snow in places like the creek – there are some signs of Spring – we even found a patch of violets.

The camp looks pretty lonely right now, looks like we shouldn’t have left our supply tent up (we lovingly call it the taj mahal) I guess we had a big snow load here this winter!

The dog couldn’t resist a wallowing in the settling pond.  We’re not the only ones excited to be back at the mine!

Both our new and old dig sites are not quite thawed out, but that is ok, as we still have a bit of staging to do.  You may remember that last year we had a magnetometer survey done to help us find that “good pay”  and we are really looking forward to following up on one of the “hot spots” from the survey and seeing what kind of values are there.  This spring I can tell you why there is most likely good gold there – the water is just pouring out there, draining from up on the canyon rim.  You can literally hear the water trickling down.

 

More to come – just thought I’d let you all know the news.  IT’S MINING SEASON!!!!

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Fall Colors

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.
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Can you tell me?

Double, Rainbow, Alaska, Summer, Sterling, Hwy

Alaska is an amazing place to live, work, play and raise a family it.   Every day is full of new experiences.   There is almost no way to describe the wonders every day will bring.  You could go outside on the deck and find that a mother moose has calved twins and get to see them take their first wobbly steps in this fantastic place.  You could be driving home at night and have to pull your car over to park so you can watch the northern lights dance through the sky.   When the trees have the hoarfrost on them and they look like they were pulled out of some fairytale book, you just have to stop and admire.  The photo in this post I was just driving to town to pick up some groceries and I had to pull over and take a picture, if you look close you can see the double rainbow.  Go ahead and write a comment about your favorite things that you experience where your from.

SLAVE DRIVER!

wife, mining, sleeping, caughtYou know, I can’t help that I am an early riser and like to start my day as soon as possible.  I have a passion for gold mining, maybe its being outdoors all the time with my family on a mission of sorts. Well no matter what it is I like to work as long as there is light, which is quite a while in the summer here.  My family says that I am a slave driver and that I work to hard.  I always tell them they are welcome to stay at camp and I will go out by myself.   They always come with.  Then they say that I work them to death, I say you look like your still walking around to me.   Well the photo here is me catching my wife sneaking in a standing nap hoping no one would notice she was catching a few z’s if she was standing up.  Well someone noticed and got a great picture.  I am not a slave driver!  I cant help if everyone wants to fallow me out in the morning and stay out late, until the equipment runs out of gas.  (They don’t know I sneak extra fuel into the equipment so it will run a few more hours, Ssssshhh, it will be our secret.)

Everyone loves Chicken(no, not the animal)

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This is a photo from one of our family outings to Chicken Gold Camp.  We had a ton of fun, found some gold visited with friendly people enjoyed the sights and scenery.  I cant say enough good things about the Chicken gold camp.  Anyone who gets a chance to visit chicken should look these guys up they are very friendly, they provide a lot of conveniences at their campground that would otherwise be unavailable to the recreational miner.  Here is a link to their website – Chicken Gold Camp.