Tag Archives: pay dirt

looking for the source

In the last post I explained that while our new spot ended up having spectacular gold, but we soon learned that we were only getting material brought down by small springs over the top of a bedrock cliff.

For the last few weeks we’ve been working on finding the source of that gold on the ridge up above.  In the National Forest, we’re not allowed to simply blaze new trails whenever we feel like it.  We have to work our way through the forest, with as little damage as possible, dig test holes, then go back and apply for permits to build more trail.  Sounds simple enough? Its not. The forest is thick here, so thick you cant even really see what lies ahead of you until you get right up on it.

But we have been trying.  We spent part of a day stuck on a tree where the excavator slid sideways and pinned the tree between the track and blade.  We couldn’t cut the tree, we had to winch the excavator off by hand.

With the wash plant sitting idle, we have been digging holes, getting bucket samples, fill the hole in, and rinse-repeat.  Tedious and frustrating.  The crew’s morale has been low.  We even spent part of a day sneaking into our old dig site and running some of that dirt, just so we could remember what gold looks like.

 

 

I’m sure you are wondering, if there is still gold there, why are we spending time digging test holes?  It’s because we are almost out of paydirt in that spot, we need to identify a new dig site if we are going to continue mining, and we only have one summer to do it.  We can’t do both.

What makes matters worse is just digging a bucket sample isn’t enough.  We’re digging into ancient river benches, just because you dig one hole, doesn’t mean you’ve found the correct spot in the river channel.  You could be digging in the wrong side of a curve, or where the water was too fast to collect gold, or miss the channel completely by a few feet.

We’ve found a spot that we do have access to where the gravel looks good.  Its 100 feet away from the hot spot identified on the magnetometer survey, but we thought it was worth running a few yards through the trommel to see what happens when we get into the bench.  The returns so far have been disappointing, but seem to be improving as we get further into the formation.  Summer is waning, the kid will have to go back to school soon, but all we can do is keep trying.  Gold is where you find it after all.

Videos from the south

We have started selling dirt as you all know.  Selling through amazon is a bit of a challenge since they wont ship Items back to Alaska if they are damaged in shipping.  I would like to share a story of one of these damaged bags of paydirt.

Amazon gives us the option of either destroying the bag of dirt or shipping to somewhere in the lower 48 states.  My dad happens to live in Arizona and he has never panned for gold, so I thought shipping it to him would be the best idea.  He did me the favor of video taping himself in the act of trying to find gold where gold flakes come in a little golden package, I will give you a little spoiler on the video, he didnt read the instructions.  This is a two part video, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, maybe I can get him up to the mine this year so his granddaughter can show him how to do this.

This next video concludes the first video and demonstrates that even the guy new to mining can come up with innovative ways to find that yellow gold!

Its always something…..

So there I was…on the dozer…I ask, “is there gas.”…response is,”Yes, just topped it off.”  As operator I should have looked and since I did not we spent many hours bleeding air and recharging the battery, over and over and over.  It was another wonderful and exciting weekend at the gold mine.  We learned a lot about the old John Deere 1010 Bulldozer and we managed to dig 22 buckets of Pay dirt out of the frozen ground, with the help of a propane weed burner.  You can‘t pay for day of adventure like that!

Super Bowl Weekend

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.