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.

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!!!

It Finds Gold.

This here is our little trommel wash plant that we use to run samples in. It a bit clunky, not quite round, but hey nobody is perfect and it works just fine just the way it is. How it works, we will set it up at base camp and after I have dug a sample Hole I will fill my backhoe's excavator bucket up with the dirt of interest, carry it back to where the trommel is located and then shovel the dirt from the bucket into the trommel. Once we have run the whole bucket through the trommel the we perform a clean out, it is never a lot of gold, but what it does is give us a snapshot of what the ground contains, gold wise, and depending on what we get out of the trommel we will decide to dig or not to dig?......Boy, that seems like a recurring question in this blog. This trommel seems to have very good gold recovery. We did have some grounding issues when we first started operating, if you would touch the trommel you would get a nice electric shock from it. As you all know electricity and water does not mix well. We have since solved that issue because getting shocked every time you touch the machine, just won't do. These photos are prior to having any of the pluming installed. I will try to find a picture of the complete unit to show off.

A Harring, Whats a Harring?

It seems that the story post I made was very popular so I think I will continue to tell the story of the mine through the magic of imagination.   As you all know we are looking for gold up here at Quartz creek Alaska.  What you don't know is that the gold we find is found in smaller flatter pieces.  The gold was created a couple million years ago when glaciers covered this whole area. Well most people think that nothing can live in a glacier.  Well in this area the only place for things to live was either on or in the glaciers.  Glaciers are constantly moving and grinding up the rock it is moving across.   Because of this the glacier becomes embedded with minerals and very small pieces of the bedrock.  This was the source of food for a creature called a "Harring."  The Harring looked like the cross between a big horned Beetle and an earth worm, the cross being that the earth worm had the horns kinda like the beetle. The Harring used its horns to borough through the glacier and find food as it went. It consumed the minerals and small rocks that it came across. Using the small rocks it would grind up the minerals for digestion. As the Harring digested, it only used from the minerals what its body needed, the rest was waste that would continue to pass through its body. One thing that I had not mentioned was that the Harring had its own heat source, a chemical reaction that would take place inside its body, as the remaining minerals passed through the body of the Harring it would pass through this chemical reaction, Changing the minerals into an new compound, before the waste minerals were expelled from its body.  This waste product is now valued for its beauty and rarity and people will go crazy trying to get at it.   It is what we now call GOLD!  The reason it is flat is because it had been carried through the glaciers for all those years and worn down to a flattened shape.   As the glaciers thawed the rivers carried the GOLD throughout the area depositing it in very randoms spots.  Sometimes you can get lucky and happen upon a concentration of it, but that does not happen very often.   In the picture above we performed a cleaned out after two hours of operating our wash plant.  There have never been any fossils found of the Harring since once they died the glacier took care of grinding them up to powder.

Everything Needs to be Cleaned.

At the end of the day we do a clean up of the material we ran all day.  We take the concentrates from the big red and blue wash plant, then run that dirt through a small mini high-banker to concentrate the material even more, we call this the end of the day clean up.  After that about a gold pan of material is left to have to work, and that is what My mother and father in law are doing in this picture, they are also the ones that take care of most of the equipment construction, like the Wash plant, Trommel, High-Banker and Bunk House.  We would not be able to mine without them.

Have you seen our tools?

 Here is a good front back and side view of our wash plant.  Antonio did an excellent job constructing this gold finding monster, he also made our trommel, bunk-house and he wrote another book(which is available on amazon) called "Talking Ice."  All this he did last winter so we were ready for the next season of mining as soon as the ground had thawed.  We did not want to break it so we loaded the gravel very slowly most of the summer, till we found out that it can handle a full loader bucket from the Kubota.  After that we flat moved some dirt, Very useful tool!

I'm King of the World!!!

That is what my Daughter would be yelling out if she had ever seen that dreadfully long move Titanic.  This is when we first placed the wash plant.  Everyone wanted their pictures with it........It was SO COOL! It is still super cool.  Anyone who wants to come up a visit we will take your picture with the wash plant too, free of charge.  It took a whole weekend with the 480D and Kubota to make a flat spot for the wash plant then a raised area for loading the wash plant.  There also had to be enough room to stage gravel to run in the wash plant, so the loading area had to be fairly large.  We had some trouble with the plywood restraining wall collapsing on the wash plant (It still worked was just a bit more of a pain to dig it out at the end of the season).  We will be constructing a steel retaining wall this winter for use next year.

The Mining Operation at Quartz Creek

Here we are dropping a load in the wash plant, The wash plant runs off of a two inch pump, the hopper has a vibrator motor attached to the bottom to assist in getting the dirt to slide down the hopper and fall into the sluice box, the vibration also help to break apart clumps and shake the gold stuck to rocks off.  All of our water runs off into settling ponds, you can see part of one in this picture.  We built the wash wash plant, although we will be constructing a larger one for next season, the more dirt you can move the more gold you can find.

Have not talked gold in a while

Its been a while since I posted anything, been kinda busy.  This summer I did find a little over two ounces of gold this summer, that however does not cover the cost of repair on the backhoe.  The above picture is a fallen tree on the trail into the gold mine.  Stay tuned as I will be posting some more Pictures of our Quartz Creek claim and of the gold found this year.