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?

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 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!

Mining in the Winter?

This post is to show all of you interested in the Pay dirt we are selling on ebay that it is not purchased from the Home Depot.  We had not figured it would be so popular and we were getting close to running out so the wife and I had to go back to the mine and chip at our mound of pay dirt.  We got six buckets and we are going back next weekend with the Dozer to break up even more so we can handle the popularity of our dirt.  Thank you all, those that purchased and those that are just browsing.  And remember it is not Home Depot dirt(sometimes i wish it was).

Super Bowl Weekend

We went up to the mine on Super Bowl weekend. Teresa needed more dirt for her Panning kits and bags of Paydirt, so with the help of this little machine we were able to make it up the mountain. We had to break up the frozen mound of Paydirt with the bull dozer.
We did end up staying the night at the bunkhouse and believe it or not we just about cooked our selves out. Our little electric heater really puts out the heat. The hot dogs were forgotten but we were able to manage.

The new (not so new) dozer

Well we just picked up the newest edition to our equipment fleet a 1960's John Deere 1010 crawler with a six way blade. It's amazing, runs great, pushes great, hopefully it will do a great job helping us find gold next summer. This photo is Teresa taking it out for a test run.

What is a Gold Miner?

The Gold Miner is not always searching for gold.  There are things much more precious to him.  Those precious things require much more attention than the ground under his feet.  In this photo a little girls feet left the ground while in a flat out run, ending in a very painful fall.  The Miner is first and foremost a father, then a husband, a son, a brother.  The gold miner may have hard hands, but they are comforting hands, hands that heal wounds and will pick you up when you fall.   A Gold Miner is a friend for life and will always be there if family or friend is in need.  I am a gold miner.

SLAVE DRIVER!

You know, I can't help that I am an early riser and like to start my day as soon as possible.  I have a passion for gold mining, maybe its being outdoors all the time with my family on a mission of sorts. Well no matter what it is I like to work as long as there is light, which is quite a while in the summer here.  My family says that I am a slave driver and that I work to hard.  I always tell them they are welcome to stay at camp and I will go out by myself.   They always come with.  Then they say that I work them to death, I say you look like your still walking around to me.   Well the photo here is me catching my wife sneaking in a standing nap hoping no one would notice she was catching a few z's if she was standing up.  Well someone noticed and got a great picture.  I am not a slave driver!  I cant help if everyone wants to fallow me out in the morning and stay out late, until the equipment runs out of gas.  (They don't know I sneak extra fuel into the equipment so it will run a few more hours, Ssssshhh, it will be our secret.)

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.

What is it, that dwells at the Quartz Creek Mine?

The gold mine is a magical place, it is full of wonder and amazement its a place that just draws people in. Is it the mystery and beauty of quartz creek that brings people here? We get a lot of visitors through out the summer months, even during thanksgiving weekend we had some visitors drive up. Usually not anyone we know, but normally very friendly.  So all visitors heed the following warning.  There are some elusive creatures that dwell in the the shadows of the trees up there at our quartz creek mine. Mischievous little creatures. You may find your full soda that you just set down is now half empty, or that shovel that you put next to the rock is now leaning against the tree. So keep a sharp eye out you may even catch a glimpse of one of the mystical beings, in fact I got a picture of one with my camera, it was peeking out from behind a tree and I am posting for all the world to see as proof that there is a reason that your coffee cup is not where you left it.(or maybe you just forgot where you put it.)

Layers, Its All About the Layers

This is a photo from the first hole we started digging in at the gold mine. You can see the different layers in the gravel very well. The almost black layer seems to have a large quantity of gold in it. Other locations that has deposits of gold are found are in the clay layer and in the fractured slate(bedrock). This hole was dug completely by hand, we used a Keene High banker to process the dirt from this hole and we pulled 3/4 of an ounce out of here.

Gona Get Some Gold!.......Maybe not.

Well while we were up at the mine for Thanksgiving, I thought boy it sure would be fun to get the dredge out and find some gold. So I wandered on down to Quartz creek to see if there were any good spots to slip in the water. As the creek came into view I had to thoughts, "Brrrrrrrr" and "Boy I am glad the state does not allow dredging in the winter months." This photo is what I saw.   Just so everyone knows, I am really only allowed to dredge in the Salmon creek/streams from May, 15 - July, 15.

How do you KNOW there is GOLD there.

Well knowing that there is gold somewhere is actually just some educated guesses, lots of small sample holes, and a pinch of luck. In reality it is not much more complicated than that. This hole here we were processing the material on top of the clay in a line perpendicular to how this hole has been dug when the gold just stopped, so I moved the equipment back to a point that we were producing gold from and started making this cut up the hill from that Point. As we were moving up the hill the concentrations of gold were getting higher and higher. Then guess what?.....Our season ended. At least we have a starting spot for next years search for the glory hole!

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Turkey Day everyone. I put a summer picture of the base camp, because we are having thanksgiving up at the gold mine today(and i kinda wish we were still mining). We are going to forge through the snow, thaw out the bunkhouse and have our turkey dinner. I will get some winter pictures of the mine while we are up there today.  I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday, If you have to drive be cautious of other drivers, slow down, don't be in a hurry and If your drinking during the festivities, get a cab or have a designated driver.  We all want to get home safe.