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!