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.