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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Finally got up and running. Working the bugs out of our trommel. She likes to jam up with rocks sometimes right where the hopper chute goes into the trommel.
We tilted the angle of the trommel and it helped a great deal, though occasionally one works it’s way in there and then things get exciting. You have to try to clear the jam before burning the belts and fast enough that a bunch of material doesn’t build up and overrun the sluice after the drum starts turning again. Wish there were a way to avoid this but we haven’t found any so far.
We have been getting a little gold. A lot of overburden came down over the winter. There is gold in it, so we ran it.
The dig site is looking pretty promising. Just removed this huge rock. Started uncovering it last year. We discovered it had a halo of gold around it. Can’t wait to see what it has under it.
This is a photo of me in a sample hole I dug inspecting my handy work and collecting samples to run back at camp. There was hardly any gold in this hole. I found out later in the season that the reason I did not find any gold here was because I dug to deep/not deep enough. The gold in this seems to be in one of two places, we find it sitting on a clay layer and we also find it sitting right on the bedrock. This hole I dug just past the clay layer but not to the bedrock.