We went up to the mine on Super Bowl weekend. Teresa needed more dirt for her Panning kits and bags of Paydirt, so with the help of this little machine we were able to make it up the mountain. We had to break up the frozen mound of Paydirt with the bull dozer.
We did end up staying the night at the bunkhouse and believe it or not we just about cooked our selves out. Our little electric heater really puts out the heat. The hot dogs were forgotten but we were able to manage.
Well we just picked up the newest edition to our equipment fleet a 1960’s John Deere 1010 crawler with a six way blade. It’s amazing, runs great, pushes great, hopefully it will do a great job helping us find gold next summer. This photo is Teresa taking it out for a test run.
The Gold Miner is not always searching for gold. There are things much more precious to him. Those precious things require much more attention than the ground under his feet. In this photo a little girls feet left the ground while in a flat out run, ending in a very painful fall. The Miner is first and foremost a father, then a husband, a son, a brother. The gold miner may have hard hands, but they are comforting hands, hands that heal wounds and will pick you up when you fall. A Gold Miner is a friend for life and will always be there if family or friend is in need. I am a gold miner.
You 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.)
It seems that the story post I made was very popular so I think I will continue to tell the story of the mine through the magic of imagination. As you all know we are looking for gold up here at Quartz creek Alaska. What you don’t know is that the gold we find is found in smaller flatter pieces. The gold was created a couple million years ago when glaciers covered this whole area. Well most people think that nothing can live in a glacier. Well in this area the only place for things to live was either on or in the glaciers. Glaciers are constantly moving and grinding up the rock it is moving across. Because of this the glacier becomes embedded with minerals and very small pieces of the bedrock. This was the source of food for a creature called a “Harring.” The Harring looked like the cross between a big horned Beetle and an earth worm, the cross being that the earth worm had the horns kinda like the beetle. The Harring used its horns to borough through the glacier and find food as it went. It consumed the minerals and small rocks that it came across. Using the small rocks it would grind up the minerals for digestion. As the Harring digested, it only used from the minerals what its body needed, the rest was waste that would continue to pass through its body. One thing that I had not mentioned was that the Harring had its own heat source, a chemical reaction that would take place inside its body, as the remaining minerals passed through the body of the Harring it would pass through this chemical reaction, Changing the minerals into an new compound, before the waste minerals were expelled from its body. This waste product is now valued for its beauty and rarity and people will go crazy trying to get at it. It is what we now call GOLD! The reason it is flat is because it had been carried through the glaciers for all those years and worn down to a flattened shape. As the glaciers thawed the rivers carried the GOLD throughout the area depositing it in very randoms spots. Sometimes you can get lucky and happen upon a concentration of it, but that does not happen very often. In the picture above we performed a cleaned out after two hours of operating our wash plant. There have never been any fossils found of the Harring since once they died the glacier took care of grinding them up to powder.