Had a Mickey Mouse trip

[Capt Nemo]

Went back to Lake Superior again.

The spot where I dumped my tailings last time was washed away, and covered in 6-12" of bare cobble. I spent the rest of yesterday looking for some new spots. I tried the spot that a local told me about east of Deer Park. The road in was barely wider than the vehicle and made me wish I had 4WD, but was passible. The trailhead to the beach was a good 100' above the beach. Cobble was all over with not a hint of black sand. I walked about a half mile over what looked like the surface of Mars to an eroded area. Thin black sand was present in a lot of places, but not the thick slick I was told about. I checked another spot on the same beach that I had been mining, and found black sand where the lake had eroded the grassline. Working that would involve tearing up the grassline by undercutting. I'd also have to worry about things collapsing on me. There was OK parking there, but not for overnighting, as there was a NO CAMPING sign. So I decided to try hitting the cobble at the waterline of my old spot.

The way I left it, and the way I found it.


Several of the improvements to the Model 5 worked well. But the biggest problem was the grizzly dropping chunks that should have been rejected. The bed was locking up on the amount of pea gravel and larger material that the jets couldn't move. I filled 2 buckets and would have to cleanout due to bed lockup. 2 cleanouts is a 3.5 gal bucket. I then shut down and classified the cons to window screen and fed everything to the Model 7 bed for concentrating. That took everything down to a 14" panfull.

Here's what came out with window screen. (<3/4")


Here's the Model 7. (3"x12"x2.5")


Had a small agate show up on the grizzly!


May have bagged a flake or two, and another platinium flake, but it doesn't look like there's much 15" down into the cobble. Looks like it's time to give up on the header box and build a trommel.

It was a Mickey Mouse trip!

 

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[et1955]

Have you ever dug down to see if there are layers of black sand below the surface, here in Washington state when I go beach mining I don't play with the surface material but instead dig down until I hit this blueish black sand layer. I would look for past storm deposits below the surface, the beach changes as the season changes, storms are your best friend when it comes to beach mining.

 

[Capt Nemo]

Last year there was a 2" black sand layer about 12" down in the blond sand yielding around 1-1.5 g per yard. That washed out and was replaced with about the same thickness of coarser material about 3" above the heavy cobble, and the black sand was washed into the grass line. This time, there was very little black sand in the grass line. The comparison pics above are a little more than a month apart. So everything's moving around like a squirrel on Red Bull, and making tracking down the gold real hard. I have a feeling that the gold washed down deep into the cobble, but with the way the waves and currents are moving things, the gold may have washed further down the beach, or may have been washed out to sea. All in all, it will someday end up beyond Whitefish Point in deep water.

Wouldn't mind building a concrete trough to let the waves push the material over! A single storm could move a few hundred yards over it!