Fall is here, the freeze is on, and it’s time to call it for the season. We fenced off the digsite and hauled everything home.
We have some great plans for next year, new equipment and modifications to our trommel should make for better production.
So until next year yellow gold, we bid you adieu
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.
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.
Got the larger, deeper, longer sluice box hooked up. Wouldn’t you know it, our current pump system doesn’t put out enough water to run it. Oh well, not all experiments work, not my favorite part of mining.
Back to the old sluice, running some dirt. Get a rock jam every once a while but otherwise works ok.
You know it’s going to be a pretty good run when you see this in the concentrate bucket
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Back here at the claim. Now that we know our homes are relatively safe from the forest fire. Got some much needed rain, it doesn’t make it much fun to work outside, but we don’t have to worry about every little spark from grinding or welding. Campfires are still banned, so we had to huddle up by the little buddy heater in the storage tent last night.
First order of business, noticed some cracked hoses on the backhoe. Off to town to get new ones made.
Then some welding and grinding on the trommel. We are adapting the sluice that was from our old wash plant. It’s wider, deeper and longer. Should work much better. Also have to put lock nuts on the belt tension bolts to make sure they don’t rattle out.
Seems like we spend more time getting ready to run than it takes to actually process the dirt. Part of mining I guess.
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