Signed!!!

Just got some GREAT NEWS.  The Forest Service in DC signed our Plan of Operations on Friday.  God willing, we'll be back to work by May 20th.  Can't wait to see that yellow gold!!!

Did you know our blog has moved?  Follow us at www.alaskapaydirt.com

 

So what's going on in this picture?  Why, I am thawing out a pile of frozen paydirt that's what!  I have a big old tarp and a diesel heater and I'm thawing and screening paydirt to sell.  At the end of the mining season last year, I made a pile just in case.  I never thought to have to do this as we had 1500 bags in my garage, ready to go.  That's what we get for aiming low.  We have been so blessed with folks wanting our paydirt to try their hand at mining in the comfort of their own home.   We sold that 1500 bags by January, so every few weeks here I am, going back for more.  Thank you to all of you for your support for our dream. 

The other thing you may notice is there is no snow on the ground.  While the rest of you are buried in snow in places like Tennessee and Georgia, we have YOUR warm weather up here.  I've lived here all my life and have never seen anything like this winter.  Its gotten up to 60 degrees around here at a time its supposed to be below zero.  Don't know what is going on with our planet, but I say let's just skip this winter and go straight to Mining Season!

If you are interested in ordering the fruits of our labor check out the Get Our Gold!! link.

Ouch!

On their way to Arizona to pick up our trommel, my folks had a run in with a moose.  Everyone is safe and they are en route again with my truck this time.

Look what Santa brought

Hi everyone, look at our newest toy!  We won this on an eBay auction out of California.  We feel super lucky, it's a one of a kind made by Titan Engineering, who builds 300 ton per hour trommels.  This is a smaller, portable version and should speed up our process.  

Thanks to our family who went and got it from California.  Now we have to get it from their house in Arizona to Alaska, road trip anyone?

Autumn bounty

Took the time to pick some wild currents and pigs ear and orange delicious mushrooms.  There's more treasure than just gold at the mine!

Public comment

Please consider supporting our operation by submitting a public comment.  To be considered, comments need to be specific to this proposal only and not include political opinions not relating to this proposal. 

Something like you support the Winter Supplemental Plan because it will allow for mineral exploration and have negligible impact on the National forest considering the size of the Chugach National Forest and the scope of the proposed operation.

Thank you all for your suport!

 Thank you all for your support!

It's bear country!!!

It's bear country up here.  Look who came to visit this morning.  Mother and almost full grown cub.  They were just passing through, didn't bother anyone.

Exploration time

Since the forest service has us effectively shut down until we get our equipment back, we went back to the beginning and dug a few test holes.  Gotta have another spot lined up in case this one runs out.  

Also we washed rocks and cleaned up the last little bit of the good stuff we had.  

We used the homemade trommel and ran backhoe buckets full through it.  First hole, nothing, second we did find some color, doesn't look like much but it is considering that we were not anywhere deep enough and it is only one backhoe bucket worth.  Hopefully you can see it in the picture.  

Here is the kid holding a spruce grouse chick we almost stepped on, his mom was in the trees squeaking at us so we let him go and left the area for a while.

Yes that's a nugget!!!

Because of our areas glacial history.  It's pretty uncommon to find nuggets.  We ding large flat flakes, yes, but no nuggets.  Near that big rock I featured in the last post, we found one!  

Came in at a tenth of a gram, not a life changing nugget but maybe his big brother is in there somewhere.  Here's the picture of our week total and you can see the nugget towards the bottom.

The big rock

We've uncovered this huge rock in our dig.  We are estimating it may be the size of a refrigerator, but we don't have it all uncovered yet.  Paydirt collected from around the rock seems to have a lot of gold and nice pickers.  

Excited to find out!  

We are having some equipment issues at the moment.  So we have to face those before we can move forward...

Blue clay

Hi guys,

Ran two runs today, still running the cons.  

We came upon this neat clay layer in our dig.  Smelled like swampy gym socks.  But, we've never really found as gold as much in it as on it.  Tough to dig, we wanted to where the bedrock was but we couldn't get through it.  Water coming out had an oily sheen on it...

I have a picture of our gold so far, somebody dumped it on to of the morning run before I could get a picture for you guys.

Also have a picture to show you it's not all work and drama.  This is grandpa signing Mexican lullabies for the kid.

The glory hole

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Ramping up

After a late spring.  We finally got our stuff set up.  We built a retaining wall next to the wash plant so we could load it safely from above.  It was a group effort.

Behind every miner..

This post is dedicated to our chief mechanic, engineer, and welder extrodanar.  We couldn't do anything without his ingenuity an hard work.  He designed and built our wash plant, grizzly, and whatever other hair brained inventions we come up with.

 In this picture we see our hero working two days in the hot sun on a modification to the wash plant that we ended up removing due to safety consternation.  Some days, we let him off the hook to go on a motorcycle ride, but not too often...

New additions

This year we have a new lineup on gold getting stuff.  This in Clyde's out "new to us" John deer 1010 Dozer.  The new bigger wash plant with a 12 ft long sluice.  And a grizzly for taking out all those dangerous monster rocks.

Welcome to the start of the 2013 mining season

Here we are just getting ramped up!  We have a new wash plant, a grizzly, a new dozer and after a late spring, some sunny weather!

So far we've spent most of our time getting staged.  So far we are a little under a half ounce for our year total.  But today is the day we are really gonna start MINING!

The New Bigger Better Plant

This is our new wash plant at the gold mine set in place and ready to run.  Grandma and Lyra are trying it out.  We got about two half days of running in this first three day weekend, we ran into some hiccups but we were able to devise some work a rounds.  I will talk about more of that later.  Lets get to the Meat and potatoes, what you really came here to see GOLD, this lower picture is what we hauled out of the ground our first weekend there.  It is just shy of quarter ounce of gold.

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!

Sneak Peak

This is a sneak peak at our new, improved and bigger wash plant.  The sun is out the snow is melting and soon you will be able to see some photos of this beast in action.  As you have seen, if you have been following the blog, we have been up to the mine this winter.  We have done some snow clearing to hurry along spring melt so we can set up our new equipment.  Stay tuned for 2013 mining season news and photos, ITS ALMOST HERE!!!

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!