Tag Archives: Trommel

Late Spring

I know what you are thinking.  It’s almost June?  Why aren’t we mining yet?

I don’t know where this global ‘warming’ I was promised is, but I can tell you that doesn’t seem to be the case this year.  Its COLD.  Too cold, the ground is still frozen and there is still snow.  We had to plow our way in there just to get to our stockpile of paydirt. Add to that, recovery from a minor surgery and, yes, we’re running late this year.  My apologies.

I don’t have much more to share with you right now.  I did want to give a mighty shout out too our local trade school.  Our very talented and patient welder moved away last year and as usual we had broken a few things on the trommel last season.  Out of desperation I called the welding instructor at the technical school in Seward and offered to donate to their welding class if they could help me out.  Those kids fixed the trommel right in the parking lot on the last day of classes.  The charge?  All they would take was a box of Donuts!  That’s a good deal!

If you know a young person who’s looking for a career in the trades, I highly recommend AVTEC, I spent some time walking around while I was waiting for the repairs and it’s a great campus and they really seem to have a wide range of offerings – everything from renewable energy to cooking.

If you’ve been on our site lately, you may have noticed we’ve started carrying some prospecting supplies, I’ve been slowly adding them to the site.  Most of these will ship from the manufacturers warehouse for free right to you.  We don’t make much off them, just trying to help you guys out. If you are looking for a new sluice box or metal detector to use outside this summer check it out.  If you are looking for something we don’t have  let us know what you are interested in and I’ll see if can get you a good deal.

Somehow the gold isn’t all

First thing’s first.  I want to apologize for the lateness of this post.  We’ve been packed up for the season for sometime now, and knowing this was going to be the final post of the year, I wanted to put a positive spin on it.  I wanted something other than “well that sucked, and now its over.”  I wanted to tell you guys that we did eventually find the source of the great gold we were getting at the bottom of the cliff face, and show you photos of the sluice box and pans just piled with gold.

Yesterday, when reading my favorite poem, the ‘Spell of the Yukon’ by Robert Service,  I came across the following:

I wanted the gold, and I sought it; 
   I scrabbled and mucked like a slave. 
Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it; 
   I hurled my youth into a grave. 
I wanted the gold, and I got it— 
   Came out with a fortune last fall,—  
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it, 
   And somehow the gold isn’t all. 
I realized that this IS part of gold mining, and you guys would understand.
It’s not the GOLD that matters, it’s the STORY that does.  So here it goes.
Well that sucked, and now it’s over.
We continued to search for the source of the gold we’d found.  We studied maps, built roads, and dug test holes.  The rain that plagued us almost this entire season doubled down for the end of the summer, and we found ourselves spending most of our time getting stuck, getting unstuck, or repairing roads.
In one particular stroke of bad luck, a fallen tree got caught up in the track of the dozer, and got pushed right through the window of our new excavator parked nearby.  As I drove up on a four wheeler, I found my husband with his head in in hands.  He said, “it’s so hard not to get discouraged.”
It gets worse.  The next day, guess who came to visit?  Why, the friendly neighborhood MSHA inspector (mining safety and health administration), and this is what he saw.
 
For those of you that aren’t miners, you don’t know the fear that these four letters strike in the hearts of small miners.  While MSHA’s purpose is valid and honorable, mining safety laws are written for multi-million dollar operations, are up to the interpretation of the inspector, and are very subjective and difficult to understand.  As a small operator, compliance is almost impossible.
We lucked out. We got an inspector who was a pretty decent fellow; no tickets, but a laundry list of things to fix.
It was maybe a week later, my husband and I in the woods, in the rain, using a come-along and a tree to try to get the track back on the excavator, that’s when I knew we were done.  We had run out of steam, and it was time to call it for the season.
I don’t know what next season holds, we are too exhausted right now to make any plans.   While we settle in for the long winter, I’ll leave you with the last passage of that same poem.  Until next season!  God Bless.
There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting; 
   It’s luring me on as of old; 
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting 
   So much as just finding the gold. 
It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder, 
   It’s the forests where silence has lease; 
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder, 
   It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

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.

Once more

 Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more – William Shakespeare

After an agonizingly late spring, we finally got the mine back up and running.  And we’re finding GOLD!

Earlier this year, we made a promise to ourselves to not let things like breakdowns get us down this season.  First of all, it doesn’t make any difference, if your broke down – you’re broke down- attitude has nothing to do with it.  Also, we wanted to get back some of that feeling that made us become gold miners in the first place. We’re in God’s country, with the people we love, doing what we love – what’s there to feel bad about?

In the last post I mentioned that we lost the seal in our main water pump.  After hours of international calls, and finding out there’s a three week window to get the 200 dollar set of o-rings (highway robbery); we did the only sensible thing – we bought a brand new Honda water pump!  We should have done this years ago – water came FIRING out of the end of the trommel, we had to adjust the level.  Now as a result – we’re able to run a lot more dirt.  And we all know what that means….

Spring came in with a vengeance – I swear I could actually hear the plants growing.  Frosty nights turned into 70-80 degree days.  We even had to take a break and find some water for our crew to cool off in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It turns out we did have a little break down, we lost a hose on the backhoe.  We used the time to do some dental work on the excavator.  It looks much better with all its teeth

 

 

 

 

 

 

After running the trommel for a while we did a clean out.  We were happy with the amount of fine gold and black sand we were getting.  So we ran a little more.

 

 

 

 

 

After a few days of running, the carpets had visible gold in them.

 

Since Christmas we’ve been waiting to try out the mini trommel that Santa brought the crew from our friends at Gold Fox USA.  We were very pleased with how fast it was to run the concentrates from the sluice box, and how much gold it trapped.  I’ll do a video for you guys once we get it a little better figured out.

 

 

 

All in all, a good few days at the mine.  It’s almost time to start clearing our new hot spot that was identified on the magnetometer survey we had last year.  We’re almost out of dirt in our current spot, and now that we have everything else dialed in so well – I can’t wait to see what’s in there!

 

 

 

 

 

This is gold mining..

“This is gold mining. You love ALL of it, or you love NONE of it!”  

These were my husband’s words to me when he noticed the color drain from my face as 14 thousand pounds of bulldozer came slamming down on the tilt trailer.  He was teasing, but he’s not wrong.

I absolutely love the spring. I love dreaming about what we might accomplish this year at the mine.  I love seeing the first leaves come out on the trees.  I love seeing how the river has changed.

I don’t particularly enjoy hauling all our equipment down winding mountain roads 70 miles from our home.  The price of getting to mine in the National Forest is that everything has to be removed at the end of the season, and staged again in the spring.  So we pay that price.

 

 

But we survived, we got all the equipment there. Then it was time to stage the trommel, muck out the settling pond, unroll the hoses.  Getting the level right on the sluice box and trommel is always an exercise in trial and error.  “Where is ____ tool?”  “Did you remember the ______ .”

There’s nothing like when that first water comes down the sluice box.  That’s when, in my mind anyway, it’s really mining season.

We got the water going, the only thing left to do was run some dirt.  We had our friend the welder make some plumbing changes to the trommel, and it seems like it’s really going to make a huge increase in our production.  The trommel processed the material as fast as I could feed it.  I never once had to use my trusty 2×4 to push a rock through the hopper, or get off the excavator to undo a jam.

We decided to call it for the evening. We enjoyed the first campfire of the year.

The next morning, we loose the pump seal, and everything stops.

I don’t care how big your mining operation is, how shiny and new your equipment, it can still come to a grinding halt over something as simple as an o-ring.  And so it did.

This is gold mining.

And I love it.