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I recently sold a crusher to a geologist out of Las Vegas. He opted to make the short drive here instead of me shipping it. Glad he did! What a great guy! He even brought me 8 dvd's jam packed with over 2,000 files. (Video, Doc, PDF, etc) with tons of stuff on gold, prospecting, mining, physics (sound, light, radio waves, resonance, frequencies etc), equipment, tons of maps, AND a box of Krispy Kreme Donuts!

I learned a lot from him in the hour and a half he spent with me, and have months of data to pour through!

To make a long story longer, we got on the topic of “Gold Rush Alaska”, and the ineptitude of the crews there. We both agreed they are loosing more gold than they are getting!

So, all these crews run thousands of yards of materials a DAY! They talk about “getting down to pay”, and when they find a few specks in a pan they are all “high fiving” for the cameras!

I don't know if it was the show that aired on the 6^th of Feb, or the previous week, but when they scraped down to bedrock, they were excited to see quartz, and “knew they were on the pay dirt”.

Truth be told, had they tested the quartz, they may have found a LOT more gold, but when you run thousands of yards a day, AND your trommel classifies it down to like .250, well ANY quartz rock with gold in it OVER a ¼ inch, or even a ½ inch, goes right on through to the tailings pile.

All that large quartz rock (where the small pieces of gold they get came from in the first place) could and probably is gold laden, and they just shit it out on the rock pile! They should examine that rock, and bring in a good sized crushing plant and they might be able to double their season's take.

The only one I ever seen on that show who actually realized that ALL gold comes from the hard rock veins was Dakota Freds son Dustin who took a chopper and some gear way up above because he knew that the gold in the valley came from the outcrops up above in the mountains.

So, when you find color in a pan here is what to keep in mind. Keep testing as you work your way up the stream or wash and it should get better. At some point the gold you are finding might just disappear. At that point, you need to look to the left and right of the stream or wash, and work your way up the sides, looking for “float gold” which is pieces of quartz, or occasionally some other host rock that contains a bit of gold in it.

Eventually you will follow it up , and moving laterally as you work your way up, you will find a “triangle”, that is, the gold quartz tumbling down hill will fan out. As you get higher up, it is not as spread out. Once you get to the source, you will have found the outcrop that pushed out all that gold in the rivers.

The outcrop may well have decomposed and weathered away, which there would be no more gold in the spot. BUT that is how the old-timers found outcrops and veins. Some were pocket gold where the

quartz is totally gone but an extremely rich pocket, or indentation of a lot of gold for those who look for it.

One of the things you hear a lot about is looking on old tailing piles with a metal detector. They say that the old timers left a lot of gold in those piles. I guess they are STILL doing it! Don't through away the possible “lion's share” of the gold.

And then there is Silver. A guy I came across years ago was selling a “gold mine”. Well I thought why would someone sell a gold mine if it were viable.? Good question, right?

I could not help but call the guy and talk to him. He said the gold mine was producing a ¼ ounce per ton. Ok... so why dump a gold mine that can produce a ¼ ounce per ton? The reply was “My silver mine runs 30 ounces per ton!” So, working the silver would pay out nearly twice what the gold mine would provide, and he wanted money for bigger equipment to process the silver.

I have to wonder how many millions the crews of Gold Rush toss out each year because they are not crushing that quartz stuff. Even if they classify at ½ inch in the trommels, how many ¾+ inch nuggets get dumped when you are talking thousands of yards a day.?

Bottom line... when you find some gold in your pan, sluice, dry washer etc, PONDER over where the source of that gold came from!

Pans!

I don't know how many times people have come up to me and said, "All you really need is a pan to find gold." Technically that's true. All you really need to find gold is a pan. At some time, even with machinery, you will probably pick up a gold pan. Maybe not at the start, but more than likely at the end.

However, gold is a numbers game. The more dirt you process, the more gold you will find. Unless you hit the Mother lode, and are digging nuggets of gold. You are dealing with something much smaller. From flour to flakes to pickers. (Sounds like a double play team in baseball. “5-4-3 Double play!” I can almost hear the PA announcer.)

That’s where machinery comes into play. However, this isn’t about machinery, it’s about pans. Probably since the dawn of time, or at least when man first discovered gold, there have been gold pans. Sluices made of gold, were discovered in King Tut’s tomb. I would imagine there were gold pans made of real gold as well. But even before that, most likely pans were made out of slices of a tree trunk dished out. Wood has one problem, it swells, shrinks and cracks. So maybe the first real gold pans, as we know them, were made during the Bronze age.

However, where you find relics from gold rush times, you will find wooden pans. They could be turned out on machinery run from water wheels driven by long belts. Someone had a bright idea to go to the maker of a Knights armor and turn out gold pans. These would have been made of iron, as a Knights armor were iron plate. Eventually steel came into play, and I’m sure steel gold pans followed.

A mixture of steel and wood pans have been found from California to Australia. The Chinese prospectors are credited with introducing the riffle to the Gold pan. And you can still see a form of it today in modern steel pans. Prospectors really like steel gold pans because it served two purposes. First, of course, it was a gold pan. Second, it was their dinner plate. The pan could withstand heat, they ate off of it, cleaned it up and go back to prospecting. Maybe old time prospectors were the original , “Multi-taskers”?

Back in the mid-70’s, 1970’s that is, I’m not THAT old! I started with pie pans, which I liberated from my Mom’s cupboards. (Liberated sounds so much better than just helped myself, without ask asking. IE: Stole!) I had already been bitten by the Gold bug at age 10. However, I had no clue on how to actually find gold. (My first discovery was Pyrite, that I thought was gold.) I met a couple of guys prospecting the Whitewater River in Southern Indiana. They both had steel pans with grooves formed in the sides. They had found these in the back of “Popular Mechanics” magazine. (Might have been “Popular Science.” It’s been a long time for my memory.)

They are the ones that told me to,, “go get your Mother’s pie pans.” They had a wooden homemade rocker box lined with Shag carpeting! (This was the 70’s.) Back then, I didn’t know anything about flour gold. I thought all gold were nuggets, or at least pickers. So, I’d sift through sand from the river looking for gold I could see. I pretty much never did.

Fast forward to today. Today we have gold pans, still in steel. However, now there’s copper and the most one used are plastic. Plastic has opened up a world of new shapes, sizes and colors. (Again, another Triple Play team?) Today’s modern plastic pans come in round, square, rectangle, triangle, hexagon, U-shaped, to name the popular ones. And just about every color. Blue, green, red, black, purple, maroon, white and pink! Blue and green are the most popular, followed by black. Green and blue will make your gold stand out as well as your black sands. Black pans will make your gold “pop” out, but will hide fine black sands making final clean up difficult. The other colors, have their fans. I like blue, maroon and red for final clean ups.

Green is the most popular, but if you suffer from color blindness, then you want to stick with blue. Blue pretty much is still blue, throughout most color blindness. However, green can show up as various colors, including shades of yellow. They also come with various sizes of riffles. From no riffles to quite large riffles.

Sizes. Plastic pans range from 10” to 16”. Again, typically, bigger pans are used to work off the dirt and gravel and smaller pans are used for final clean ups. 16” pans can be a hand full, especially loaded with dirt and gravel. 14” can be as well, but is still easier to work off. 10” pans you can use one hand, but you’re limited to the amount of over burden you can work off at one time.

So, there you have it. Most small scale prospectors have many pans in there inventory. Lately there seems to be 1 - 2 new pans coming out every year. They always seem to have their supporters and their opposition. Like I always say, it’s what works best for you. I always seem to end up buying the new ones and trying them at least a few times.

Until next time, this is the old prospector.

Good Hunting!

I love the Fortymile and I always will.  We are soon approaching the week of my late husbands death.  We were on our way to cabin back in the deep heart of mining country where there is no one and believe you me, I truly understand the depth of that.  Gold mining has taken several things I loved from me.   And if you let it, it will take things from you too and it wont ask permission.  Death comes in many different way and Jim and I had talked about dying back here in this mining country but we never really believed it would happen to me  or us.  

On the morning of March 8th 2007 my now late husband and I left Tok, Alaska at a -50 degrees outside.  We never came back the same. He died in my arms on the top of Mt Witherspoon, Alaska on March 10th, 2007.  If our mining partner hadnt been with us at the time I would have sit there and died with him.  

Yellow Stuff  by sharon eddy bissell

Be careful of yellow stuff

Death is not a bluff

Like life is full of stuff

Stuff you like

Stuff you hate

It'll make you wait

There is no mistake

Death is more than stuff

Stuff you like

Stuff you hate

Yes it will make you late

Dont hesitate

You'll find your fate

Or they'll find you

Frozen cold 

From following the gold

Make your plans 

Yes you can

God alone knows your hand

      ----Sauna Creek Widow

             Sharon Bissell 

             2014

I've been busy gathering up pictures to download to a digital frame to hang up at my store.

One of the photos I scanned and downloaded was of me, diving with my Garrett XL 200 Sea Hunter. I know, the XL 500 was a much better model. The XL 200 was only made like one year, but when I bought it in the mid-80's I didn't know it. All I knew was that I heard Mel Fisher, yes THAT Mel Fisher, said that the Garrett Sea Hunter was the best metal detector he had ever used. The photo was from the late 80's.

This story deals with the early 90's. I was scuba diving off the Florida Keys. It was a Dive Vacation that I found through 'Skin Diver' Magazine. I took along my Garrett Sea Hunter since I was going to be searching for sunken treasure. After some orientation the first day, we actually dove around 2 that afternoon. In an hour of diving, all I found was junk.

I said that this was a ghost story, so I guess I should get to it. That second day we dove, I was we, as there were myself and five other divers. I was the "old man" of the bunch. (I'm always the oldest. LOL) I was at about 40-45 feet underwater searching with my Sea Hunter again. My attention was firmly planted on the sea floor beneath me. About 20 minutes into the dive, I was between 2 rock outcroppings. My Fellow divers were out of my line of sight.

I large shadow passed over me. It was long and I looked up, but didn't see anything. At 45 feet there is still some light filtering through from the sun over head. At first, I figured it was one of the other divers. But as I popped up over the rocks, they were scattered over the area. I passed it off and continued my treasure hunting. When we surfaced and regrouped at the dive boat, I asked if anyone else had seen the shadow. Of course, we joked about a Mermaid to a shark to a cloud blotting out the sun. (The cloud actually made the most sense, except it was long and narrow. And there were very few clouds in the sky.)

I never did discover what the shadow was. Neither did I find any sunken treasure. I did have a great time diving, a little drinking and kicking back with a great group of people. Not to mention, anytime I could trade my shirt and tie for swim trunks and polo, priceless.

Good Hunting, Brian (Charlotte49er @ Gold Rush Guys)