Tag Archives: glory hole

Springtime Visit

Don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that Super Bowl Sunday is a special day for us at the mine.  Years ago, we snowshoed into the claims on a Super Bowl Sunday and decided right then and there to buy them.  Ever  since its been kind of an anniversary for us, we visit, roast hot dogs, hike around.  This year, because of a scheduling conflict and the fact one of our team is a Bronco’s Fan, we did it the following weekend.  There are definite signs of spring, even a wild violet decided to sprout.

river

 

The Creek is open, the water is really low.  I was tempted to jump in there and check out some of that exposed bedrock and creek bed.

 

 

 

IMG_1164Though the glory hole and the staging area are not quite ready to get our operation going.

 

 

 

 

We did manage to get a few buckets of paydirt from our stockpile, lots of folks got dirt for Valentines day this year I think and we were running low..  Not quite ready to start the mining season, but had a great day nonetheless.

 

paydirt spring

 

Getting Gold

Hard to believe, I don’t have much to report.  We didn’t break anything, got good gold…  Looking for a piece of wood to knock on…

The weather was nasty and raining, but you hardly notice sitting in the cab of the excavator.  We’ve been getting a lot more gold attached to the quartz, which we find pretty exciting.  It means we may be getting closer to the source.

Good gold

Guess what? Went all the way home to get the trailer, started to load the little tractor, discovered a stuck lever or the backhoe attachment that was stealing all the hydraulic power. Walla! Fixed. We were right about this hole, gold keeps getting better.

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Possible glory hole?

Been a while, have a lot of stuff to catch our readers up on.

Most importantly, the formation had presented us with a gift. If you look at the main picture you can see the uniform horizontal layers, but then, as you look lower, you can see they tilt at an angle. I know what you’re thinking, there must bee a depression in the bedrock there! I bet the gold settled there when the river used to run here! Sure enough, the bedrock is getting deeper, and the gold is getting better – chunkier and more of it. Too bad we can’t run any more of it because we broke the little tractor we use for loading the trommel. 🙁

Now we are taking a trip to town to get it fixed and that gold is just sitting there, singing to us.

Here’s what it looked like for the stuff we got to run before the tractor died.

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