Smyth Creek California Gold Prospecting-Season One

[Jeff95531]

Thanks for dropping by Herb. I'm keeping this spot pretty close to my chest for sure. It took me almost two years to find it. It can't be claimed and access is easy enough. Maybe too easy as people are known to camp there from time to time. Twice I've made the long drive only to find someone doing just that and I have to go on to plan B. No way am I gonna be the one responsible for screwing this up. In fact, so far I've only been seen by F&G (me with a shovel and an orange HD bucket) and they didn't even bother stopping by. Covering my tracks is easy this time of year when you have piles of leaves all around. The natural gold trap I left behind should be informative next Spring. If that wasn't enough, there are opportunities to apply everything that I've learned here as all prospecting conditions exist there. Seasonal rains have returned but I'll be out once more for sure.

BTW, last time you mentioned something about a blind date? Did she turn out to be a gold digger? Sorry, couldn't resist.

 

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[63bkpkr]

Howdy Jeff,

First -"BTW, last time you mentioned something about a blind date? Did she turn out to be a gold digger?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

" Resisting is hard - she decided anyone that spends that much time out in nature deserves to have no restraints put upon his life, simple.

Natural traps for gold take time and energy to build but they will work. Leaves are wonderful friends of the prospector, I have a few myself! You are doing the right kind of planning and use of the location, have fun!
..............63bkpkr/Herb

 

[2cmorau]

no worries 63, california is full of em, besides rather be outdoors schmoozing sluice ,dog, me n good ole muther

 

[Jeff95531]

After days of light showers, another unexpected dry day showed up and I was able to get to the site again. Our rainy season has begun and it will be interesting to see what happens to the creek when (and how much) it floods. In the mean time, I've talked to the other Jeff (Golden Irishman) about the site and we concluded that I've stumbled onto an ancient river bed or bench deposit. Here’s why.

After the long drive the family gets to the site. The Lab’s in the water straight away, Karen’s got her book by the creek and I decided to do a walkabout on the entire area. Eventually I followed from my original site upstream and into the woods. I should add there is no water or much evidence of a stream bed really, until I find something that looks strangely out of place. It looks like a long ledge, it juts out of the mountain and is smooth as a paved road on top. Keep in mind it is all covered with vegetation, trees, etc so you really have to use your imagination to see it. One thing for sure though, nothing has moved whatever it is in many many years.

After I explored and noted as much as I could I put my gloves on, threw my gear into the bucket and hiked in. I hit my first hole again to make sure I got all I could get and came up with another quart or so of 1/8 classified. As I’m working, I’m marking, mapping and noting everything as I go. I decided on 3 new places to sample upstream and got to work moving all the rocks I could. The first two new sites proved to be very hard to work with. Lots of thumb size roots mixed with mostly moss covered too large rocks. I was finding very little material to extract. Also the 1/8 classifier was plugging up big time and I discovered I had left the ½" at home on the picnic table.

So I’m working twice as hard and getting half as much material so I moved on to final test site #3. Right away the shovel hits more rocks. They are all about softball size and lots of them. I have to keep making the hole bigger around just to get them all out. Finally I go back to the trowel and start digging and dumping unclassified but mostly rock free material into the bucket. Eventually I can even use the 1/8 classifier again and I'm seeing gold flakes and specks all over it. All of a sudden I hit something metallic sounding. I think to myself…cool, only 8 inches of gold bearing material to bedrock, just like the first hole. So I put the shovel down and start clearing the dirt away by hand to see what I hit. What I find is something I've never seen before. It’s a flat packed layer of clean, white, Lima bean sized gravel. Other things I noted is the gravel is formed into a channel at least nine inches wide at the bottom of my hole and headed up/down stream from me. Wow right? It was like opening a time capsule. I couldn't believe how clean and dry the gravel was.

My next thought was DIG!! NOW!! But, I didn't. By this time it was getting late, fixing to rain (allegedly) and I didn't have the proper tools (read classifier and a pick). Not to mention the last time I was there, I didn't hide my tracks as well as I thought so I had another half an hour or so of that to contend with. It was a hard decision to make, but it’s been there a long time and it’s not going anywhere... yet. Finally got everything packed up and wound up with about a gallon and a half of material. I got home happy safe and tired, grabbed some chow and hit the sack.

I get up yesterday and it’s not raining…again… but this time it's predicted to start in 6 hours. All my stuff was still in the back of my truck where I left it. So I grab my smallest and biggest pan, classifier, trowel and gloves and take them to my “processing” area. I get a light stream of water going, put my gloves on and wash them and everything else down into the big pan. I use some jet dry, clean it up a bit and dump it into the small pan. A couple of swirls and wow…fine gold all over the place and some ½ sized flakes in it as well. Not bad for just rinsing off the equipment.

Stay tuned…

 

[KevinInColorado]

Very excited for you...waiting with bated breath for the next installment!

 

[goldenIrishman]

Sounds good so far Jeff. One thing I'd suggest that you look into is getting yourself one of the "old school" Army entrenching tools. I'm talking about the ones with the non-folding handles that has the built in pick. They're small, light and will really tear up some ground like that gravel you came across. You should be able to find one at a surplus store or on FeeBay. Be sure it has the cover with it so you can clip it on your belt. That way it won't take an extra hand to get it to your dig site.

I'm looking forward to when I get everything taken care of and can get up that way for some vacation time so we can do some exploring and digging together.

 

[Jeff95531]

Review and revelations...

We had a powerful storm hit us with rain bands and 60+MPH winds. Knocked the power out for most everybody for an entire day. So I found some light and got out my prospecting book that I created almost two years ago. It has several chapters and is about an inch thick as it is printed only on one side of the paper. I had it out at Smyth Creek Two last time because one chapter is designated to the documentation of tests sites. Anyway I open the book and the first thing I find are the rules and regs on prospecting in the area provided to me by the FS. I remembered that it was illegal to prospect from Oct to Apr due to salmon spawning beds. But guess what? The rule doesn't say prospecting...it says panning! What I'm doing is far away from running water or Salmon redds. No pans used at all. Perfectly legal and in compliance. I felt better and thought "just goes to show you that just because you remember something doesn't mean you know it". That got me to thinking "I'm not panning...I'm mining". And then it hit me.

When I made this book, the idea was to get me from prospecting to mining. I felt that even though you are forever learning, once you can say "I'm mining" you've finally graduated. And just like school, just because you got the diploma doesn't mean you're fully trained but you should be at least capable.

All this made me think of the last time I thought I going somewhere to mine (at the falls in Dec of last year...bottom of the 9th thread) and got my a** handed to me with almost no recoverable gold found. Just goes to show you when YOU THINK you're ready to graduate, the gold will let you know if you will.

That layer of gravel I found at the end of the last trip is on my mind constantly. I know I made the right decision to leave it at the time as it's going to take several hours to dig it up and follow it up and down till I can't no more. In the mean time, I been shaking my remaining two gallons of dirt around and picking out flakes. My new scale and a 40 mesh classifier should be here today or tomorrow. Once I get those, I'll fire up the sluice and get a gold total for the 5 gallons of material I got. That should happen hopefully this week.

Heavy pans to all.

 

[goldenmojo]

Jeff that is an insightful thought about mining . Just the other day I told someone I was going mining. It was the first time I had said that and I thought at the time that I had crossed into a new place in my picking up of gold.

 

[Jeff95531]

Me and classifiers- EPIC FAIL

I remember as a teen, I was required to take pre-algebra. I did and got a 93 avg. I then went into Algebra 1 and my avg was 39. Classifiers and Algebra are one of the same to me. For example:

I've been dealing with a lot of fine gold and wanted to classify it from 1/8" to 1/16". Then maybe even 1/32". Problem is, they don't call it by inches, it's by mesh. And I hear talk of 100 and 200 mesh! Are you kidding me? I'm baffled, I can barely see the holes in the 40 mesh! I need to see the mesh to determine if my flakes will easily pass through. My feeble attempts have netted me a 20 and a 40 and BOTH are smaller than I wanted. Advice, offers, trades are encouraged.

BTW, the forecast is 7 days of rain so I sluiced till sundown and finished up the two gallons of material. I classified everything thru 1/8" and then fed it thru an 1/8" again at the hopper. Ran the first batch easy and still blew out gold. I then went back to a 4 inch drop and fed it one heaping tablespoon full, allowing a 15 second clean out. Once I was happy with the drop, I wound up cleaning out the sluice every time I saw gold nearing the edge. I did this 3 times. Good news is I can see the gold in the cons so it's similar to what has been found so far.

 

[yotaboy86]

Me and classifiers- EPIC FAIL I remember as a teen, I was required to take pre-algebra. I did and got a 93 avg. I then went into Algebra 1 and my avg was 39. Classifiers and Algebra are one of the same to me. For example: I've been dealing with a lot of fine gold and wanted to classify it from 1/8" to 1/16". Then maybe even 1/32". Problem is, they don't call it by inches, it's by mesh. And I hear talk of 100 and 200 mesh! Are you kidding me? I'm baffled, I can barely see the holes in the 40 mesh! I need to see the mesh to determine if my flakes will easily pass through. My feeble attempts have netted me a 20 and a 40 and BOTH are smaller than I wanted. Advice, offers, trades are encouraged. BTW, the forecast is 7 days of rain so I sluiced till sundown and finished up the two gallons of material. I classified everything thru 1/8" and then fed it thru an 1/8" again at the hopper. Ran the first batch easy and still blew out gold. I then went back to a 4 inch drop and fed it one heaping tablespoon full, allowing a 15 second clean out. Once I was happy with the drop, I wound up cleaning out the sluice every time I saw gold nearing the edge. I did this 3 times. Good news is I can see the gold in the cons so it's similar to what has been found so far.

Their is a 12 mesh screen and alot of the gold i find around us that isnt pickers is just small enough to pass through the 12 mesh but i run mine on my black magic miller table after i pan everything i dont know if this helps but maybe consider buying a 12 mesh screen....good luck bud

 

[goldenIrishman]

Grass Hopper! Do not look on it as a failure! Rather look at it as a learning experience! Gold is a fickle prey and one must always be ready and able to adapt to its ways in different areas! The gold in your area is a different creature with different habits than the gold down here in Arizona!!!!

Classifiers are not that hard to figure out. The sizes of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/12 etc are the size of the openings between the wires. When it's called a "Mesh" it usually means how many openings per square inch. The finer the mesh, the finer the wire used has to be to be able to get that opening size. Needless to say, if you were to use the same size wire as in a 1/2 inch classifier to make a 400 mesh it just wouldn't work.

The materials you grab from up the hill are going to run differently than the stuff you get out of the stream. Even materials from different parts of the same stream can and often will require different setups and or feed rates on your sluice. Stuff that's sandy in composition requires different angles and feed rates than stuff that is more like mud. I've even seen material composition change enough from the same hole to require a different setup. IMHO it's always better to start with a shallow angle on your box when running a material whose composition you're not used to and adjust from there. Less chance of blowing gold out the end of your sluice and having to rerun the materials again. The more shallow the angle is the slower you're going to have to feed the materials into the box. It may take longer to run all the materials, but it will take even longer if you have to rerun them several times. I know you're running a recirc system at the house so you have the ability to rerun materials, but if you take time to adjust the setup for the materials you won't have to........

 

[arizau]

http://www.netafimusa.com/files/literature/wastewater/Mesh-vs-Micron.pdf This chart will help you in understanding mesh vs. screen opening size. For example the #3 is slightly larger than 1/4" (0.250") at 0.265". A #6 is slightly larger than 1/8" (0.125") at 0.1320". 20 mesh is about 3/100's" at 0.0331" etc. The ocean beach sands and gold that I often deal with is smaller than 100 mesh.
Don't give up on the small screens. When gold is approximately equal in size to all the other particles then, due to its superior weight, it is much easier to pan or otherwise process by whatever device. Device set ups (water flow, angle etc.) will probably need to be changed for each screen size to be run.

 

[Jeff95531]

Thanks for the tips and ideas guys. And you're right Jeff, it's easier/ faster than blowing out the gold..I'll try less drop and see if the cleanouts improve.

So, on classifiers:
The numbers run higher, the holes get smaller. I think I get it. I hope so cuz I just dropped another $20 on a 12 mesh. I also have a *hitload of cons laced with black sand and fine gold that needs to be smaller than that before shipping.

Got my scale today. Take so far is 0.1 gram from 3 gl (see previous photo in vial). The pay dirt from the 2 gl have yet to be panned and the last test hole looks to be the richest...based on the sparkle per inch test.

 

[goldenIrishman]

"Sparkle per inch test"? ROLFMAO I LOVE IT!!!!

 

[Jeff95531]

Inching closer to the source…

First of all I owe everyone here a big THANK YOU for helping me make the past month my richest gold experience ever.

yotaboy86…you were dead on with the #12 classifier. And if you Google it, make sure you get a #12 and not a 12". (at least I didn't screw that up.) It works perfectly and I sure suffered without it.

arizau…I now have in my arsenal a new 12, 20 and a 40 mesh classifier. And you were right, clean up with the 40 was spectacularly efficient, effective and fast… and I sure suffered without them.

The other Jeff… “Grass Hopper! Do not look on it as a failure! Rather look at it as a learning experience!” This past month was exactly that and thank you for pointing that out to me when I needed to hear it most.

So did all of that hard work, spending, suffering and learning pay off? Ohhhh Yeah! I’m proud to say I’m a miner and THIS is what .4 grams of flakes taken out of a 5 gallon bucket looks like.



And there’s more. I’m definitely moving in the right direction as my last hole…the “sparkle per inch” stuff where I found the river gravel was insanely hot and kept me the busiest. I use a Q-tip to recover all my gold out of the pan and it’s usually one piece at a time. This batch I found out you can grab 4 flakes at a time. And four of those flakes I found are my biggest ever. When I rocked the pan back to me, they always just kinda flopped right out. (that was easy!) Just looking at them you could see they have veins like leaves do…almost 3D looking. Each large enough to cover a pencil eraser top….or should I say a little bigger than 12 mesh. Soon as I get my macro, I’ll post up some pics of the Fantastic 4.

I still have pounds of cons to classify as there’s a lot of big stuff in there that don’t belong.
New problems, new knowledge, new tools, good gold, mining…Priceless!

Next…busting up an ancient riverbed.

 

[yotaboy86]

Glad i could help...and im getting a little jealous of your new location haha but im glad you found a hot spot my best cleanout here has been that 1.8 gram nugget which i doubt will happen again. Well keep on that good ground and best of luck to you sir.

 

[Jeff95531]

Window of opportunity...rains coming...looks like it's time to go mining again...



Monday, Nov 10 Updated: Nov 9, 2014, 4:04pm PST
63°F High Sunny Chance of Rain:0% Wind: N at 14 mph Humidity: 64% UV Index: 2 - Low Sunrise: 7:00 am Sunset: 5:00 pm

Night 50°Low Clear Chance of Rain: 0% Wind: at 8 mph Humidity: 64%

Tuesday: about the same.

I went thru my storage unit from he** and the man sized pick I've seen a dozen times before went AWOL. This may mean I'll have to throw a little muscle into the rock pick. Below is a similar picture of the rocks I saw at the last test hole. My research tells me they should have appeared as robin egg blue but they appeared as white/gray to me. Then, after I exposed them to air, they should appear as a rust color. We'll see. The important thing to me so far is the size of the gravel inlaid in the bedrock (no larger than a quarter) and no visible material between the rocks.



I'm bringing plenty of containers cuz research said to wash the rocks before discarding. Hopefully I can bust them out and do just that.

 

[Jeff95531]

Well I got back to the site on Veterans day. I originally planned on Monday but that was filled with unplanned pop up things I had to do. They were all good things tho and you shouldn't argue with good Karma. Turns out on Tuesday, all the FS, FG, etc had the day off anyway...more good Karma for all involved.

So I get to my last spot and was surprised to see how much the last storm had changed things around. I barely recognized the area it and it wasn't water level that had done it. The storm had lots of 50-60 mph gusts and rain bands. There was at least 6 more inches of leaves and a couple dozen broken branches ranging from twigs to the fat end of a baseball bat. Once I got all that out of the way, I re-moved the 15 or so large rocks. I dug around and wtf, where did that gravel go? I start to panic a bit...doubting me, my spot, my eyes. Suddenly the trowel hits rock and sure enough... I'm back on it. Seems I didn't remember my latest research that the rocks wouldn't be white anymore since it had been exposed to air, rain, clay, etc.

As I enlarged the hole, I ran out of gravel all the way around. Turns out it was a pocket and not a channel. So ok, still ok...it's at the lowest point and right where I wanted it to be. Grabbed my rock pick and put pointy end down right in the middle. It broke up fairly easy and I went about digging and classifying using 1/2". The gravel was about three inches down and more dirt below that. I went to check the classifier and fine gold was on leaves, sticks, rocks, just about everything. Since there wasn't much junk, I decided to keep it all and stop classifying. After a couple more inches of dirt, all these roots start showing up...kite string size to baseball bat size. It was then I finally realized I was digging at the base of a large Birch tree. I had been so focused on following the gold, all I saw was a spot that needed to be dug. Talk about tunnel vision.

Disclaimer-The following is not my spot but looks a lot like it.



The roots turned the mining into a archaeological dig and I sure thought about/wished I had the vac. But I kept probing and table spoon digging and the hole kept getting deeper and bigger until I hit bedrock...about 2 and a half feet down from the surface. Until now, my deepest holes have been about a foot to bedrock. The roots were a just a huge PITA...the large ones were holding tennis ball size rocks in a death grip and and I had to break them in place with the rock hammer. The smaller roots kept grabbing and emptying my spoon and I could see gold flakes falling out and tumbling back down. Flakes and fine gold were all over... on the dirt, on the red tree roots, the black decaying tree leaves and rocks. I decided the string size roots had to go but left the big ones alone. Towards the end I was upside down and halfway in the hole using my bare hands to get out every bit (it's really hard to quit when you can see the gold in your dirt). Once I stopped it was just like the visits before...a little over two hours and I had one 5 gallon bucket to bring home. I covered my tracks, got home, showered and went into town for a pizza as it was way past dark, we were starving and I sure didn't want to cook.

THIS time I'll take my time prepping and sluicing. All this dirt looks just like regular old topsoil till water hits and it turns to a peanut butter color. I'd rather rinse it a couple more time than run it that way thru the sluice. Also, I now have the right equipment to process the cons...should go a lot quicker.

Next up...clean up, clean out and a total.

 

[yotaboy86]

Sounds awesome i am very curious to see ho it turns out for you especially since you can see the gold in the dirt. You must have been very excited..and good luck!

 

[Jeff95531]

Thanks yotaboy86, I was excited. The rain let up this afternoon and I opened the bucket for the first time since I got home. I looked in and there were gold flakes sitting right on top. I had to grab a table spoon and snatch up what I could see. Panned it down and got this:



I wish I could have got the light right on that biggest flake in the middle.

I classified the rest at 1/2" and washed all the roots, rocks, sticks and leaves and gave the rest of the material a good first rinse which left me with 4 gallons to start working on.