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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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.
Things going well here. Nice little picker we got the other day. Nice of the mosquito to pose for reference. I think we have discovered through test hola that we have a depression in the bedrock ahead of us. Old waterfall maybe? Only problem is the only safe way to get the loader in there is dig from where we are. May as well process the dirt while we are at it.
All has been going pretty well. We keep breaking the pull strings on the pumps for some reason, but we can deal with those kind of fixes.
I swear if we didn’t have bad luck, we wouldn’t have any luck at all. The bar that we set the tension for the belts on the trommel decided to fall off. We managed to wedge it with an axe head of all things until we get the welder.
Next the pull string on our pump decided to break, we had a spare so no big deal. Had a good couple of runs, and then the backhoe decided not to start anymore. Today multiple trips to town are called for.
We didn’t get a lot of gold, every time we have to leave for a while we knock the high wall on our dig spot in so no passers by get hurt while we are not here. We are going through a lot of overburden. If we get the back
hoe going, we should get better results.
Here I am bragging about the great weather we have been having. A cold front from the arctic moved down and things got a bit chilly. Snow on the mountains.
Trommel working petty good. We sped up the motor a little and only had one jam up the last run. Got to take a break and run the backhoe to the doctor. Fluid leaking from the transmission. Not sure what it is, but more than we can fix in the field.
Starting to get through the overburden, gold starting to look better, though still not as good as last year. Hope our streak isn’t petering out after all this.
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