One day we decided to take a break from digging and do some more exploring of the claim. We decide to walk up the mountain from where we were digging and found a large outcropping of bedrock. At first glance it did not look very significant, other than it was a large shelf with 75 feet exposed, it looked like a giant step. We walked around this outcropping inspecting is closer and as we started to pull the moss off of the face of the rock we uncovered a very large quartz vein with tons of stringers running all through the formation. We kept pulling off moss and kept uncovering more and more quartz. My mother-in-law found a loose piece of quartz and pulled it loose, it was a beautiful crystalline quartz specimen. We are very suspect that this quartz is the source for the gold we are currently finding, The plan is to send out a few grab samples for assay, wish us luck. Who love's rocks.......I do! I do!

Dreams of finding "PAY DIRT!"

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.