Finding losts of Mercury in local creek while panning gold

[Old_Festus]

I was out this afternoon, panning in a new area and was finding quite a bit of elemental liquid mercury in each of my pans, as I got down to black sand. I was surprised how much of it there was (3-4 little balls of it in each pan). Being new to prospecting, this was the first time I ran across mercury.

What do most of you do with mercury when you find it in this state, sitting at the bottom of creeks, etc? I didn't have anything with me to collect it (glass vial)...if that's the best thing to do. I know its a pollutant and bad for critters in the creek.

Should I collect it when I find it? I see some people use it to gather up flour gold. I havent read up on that yet but was just wondering about the mercury itself, free in the creek.

Incidentally, there is an old abandoned manufacturing plant right next to the creek where I am panning, making me wonder if this was the source of the mercury getting into the water decades ago.

 

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[63bkpkr]

festus,
Find out what the manufacturing plant was doing to learn if they are the source of the mercury and if not then how far up stream does it go? This may be a case for a HasMat cleanup as that is a lot of mercury. Any aquatic life down stream has been contaminated. Anyone eating that comes out of that water will ingest mercury. Have you ever found gold in the creek or has it been there historically? If so run some of it through a chammy to see if the Mercury had caught any gold.

I would think it is best to store elemental liquid mercury in plastic bottles with a good seal.

I think the authorities need to be told ASAP.....................63bkpkr

 

[chris rizin]

Hypothetically speaking you could collect it and if its gold bearing when mercury is burnt off you would be left with the gold.. Hypothetically speaking of-course.. Now it's not safe to inhale the vapors and bad for the environment.. So i would advise against that..

 

[Back-of-the-boat]

That Mercury may have some Gold in it I would find out how to extract it w/out burning it off. Someone may be doing some old fashioned type of Illegal operation upstream or it could be naturally occurring,There might be some cinnabar somewhere close by.

 

[Old_Festus]

I'll have to do some research and see what the plant used to do. It clearly has been abandoned for a good 30 or more years and pretty dilapidated. I was finding a lot of the mercury between huge cement slabs, that the I presume the plant had placed across the river, forming a series of small waterfalls. I was digging all the muck out from between the seams and finding lots of heavies to include lead, metal bits and mercury. The creek is now low and so the tops of the concrete slabs are all above the waterline. They all span about 25' across from one side of the stream to the other, with crack seams that run with them. I'm going to head back over there today or tomorrow and see if I keep getting more mercury...but at any rate I wont return any of it back into the creek. I wasn't sure if plastic was alright to contain mercury...I thought it had to be glass.

Maybe the mercury will contain some gold, so I guess I'll see after I collect enough of it and learn how to extract it.

I've been finding some gold in the creek...usually 3-5 colors per pan but mostly small flakes and more flour gold than anything so far. I'm still trying to get down to the bedrock where I'm digging now. I'm down about 20" but the sand and gravel are really piled up.

Also there just might be cinnabar in the area...I just looked it up online and have been seeing rocks in the water, similar to samples shown on line. In fact, I saved a small piece of one such rock to figure out what it was...I'll post it here in a couple minutes.


Sorry for the poor photo..I couldn't zoom in on it without it getting very blurry.

 

[Oakview2]

 

[Fullpan]

Old Festus - you have stumbled on to something very interesting. You can entertain us for months with this thread! Just some random thoughts - first, is
your mercury (Hg) shiny or dull and sluggish? If the little beads act "lumpy" as you swirl them around with your black sands (bs), they probably have amalgamated with gold. Second, as was stated above it needs to be researched where the Hg came from (forget the Hazmat authorities for the moment, if
it was devastating the environment, they would have been all over it by now. You can always let them know later on). Third, there are many utube videos
of miners extracting gold from liquid Hg in third world countries. There is little danger in squeezing Hg through a shammy IF you wear disposable gloves and/
or wash your hands thoroughly. Do not handle if you have open cuts on your hands. As far as storage of the recovered mercury goes, any leakproof container
will work. There are hundreds of pounds of Hg stored in old timers garages, basements, etc. in Calif. only because of the hassle/hysteria/regulations involved
with proper disposal. And finally, you may have found something of real value so, keep us posted but be cautious.

 

[Old_Festus]

Old Festus - you have stumbled on to something very interesting. You can entertain us for months with this thread! Just some random thoughts - first, is
your mercury (Hg) shiny or dull and sluggish? If the little beads act "lumpy" as you swirl them around with your black sands (bs), they probably have amalgamated with gold. Second, as was stated above it needs to be researched where the Hg came from (forget the Hazmat authorities for the moment, if
it was devastating the environment, they would have been all over it by now. You can always let them know later on). Third, there are many utube videos
of miners extracting gold from liquid Hg in third world countries. There is little danger in squeezing Hg through a shammy IF you wear disposable gloves and/
or wash your hands thoroughly. Do not handle if you have open cuts on your hands. As far as storage of the recovered mercury goes, any leakproof container
will work. There are hundreds of pounds of Hg stored in old timers garages, basements, etc. in Calif. only because of the hassle/hysteria/regulations involved
with proper disposal. And finally, you may have found something of real value so, keep us posted but be cautious.

I'm glad to hear my little find is of interest to some of us. As far as your questions Fullpan...the mercury (Hg) is very shiny and rolls all over smooth areas, with little effort in the pan. I don't think the beads acted "lumpy" as I swirled them around with the black sands.... but again I didn't know what it would act like if it was carrying gold flour. I'll have to check it out as I started collecting it today. Also since the next 2 days are supposed to be rain...I'll start researching what the plant used to do in attempt to learn where all the Hg came from.

Anyway...as I do most everyday, I headed back down to the creek for a good 6 hours of panning with my brother. I now took special note of the mercury that I was finding and the abundance of those red colored crystaline rocks, which I now presume must be lots of cinnabar.
With nearly each pan, I was collecting the mercury as it rolled around my pan and placed it into a plastic gold collection tube. I figured I was doing the environment a favor..plus I could use the mercury if I decided to use it to collect flower gold.

Now one interesting aspect of this entire stretch of water (around where the old factory stands) is a huge abundance of very thin, single strand metal wires, which are all about 1/2" long and quite thin (thin like an insulin needle.... if you can relate to that gauge wire).
The water is littered with them..way more than one would expect to find in a creek. You get them often 2-3 pieces in each pan you sift. Some of the wires are clearly non precious metals, and very rusted and corroded....However, many of them look to be made of gold and others are silver. Best I can tell, it may be very fine silver solder wire and gold solder wire ....which must have been used at one time, during some sort of (unknown) manufacturing process.
Odd though,.... because we normally associate such high tech soldering with modern day electronics, cell phones, computers etc. Not a factory plant that must be closed a good 30 years. Also in the water are little round metal wafers (less then 1/4" across and about 1/32" thick), that look like tiny round wafers, lots and lots of them buried way down with the heavies.

I think they are some sort of metal alloy prills, that may at one point have been melted in furnaces to do something with them,...who knows. I think maybe they are made of nickle.

All pretty odd huh?

I can't imagine them intentionally dumping buckets of this stuff (especially gold and silver wire pieces) into the creek some 30 years ago...but my prospecting is leading me to believe this is the case. (Not saying they are in fact real gold or silver at this point)

What I did was start collecting samples of that golden wire as well as the silver wire. I'd ideally like to test both, for alloy content, to determine what percentage each wire is of their respective precious metal. For example, I understand that silver solder will be whatever percentage of silver.... then mixed with something else.
Perhaps both types of wires are pure..who knows at this point. They both bend very easily. Both the gold (colored) wire is bright and shiny like my wedding ring and the gold I am panning....as is the silver wire pieces...very shiny...unlike all the dull lead pieces I'm also finding.

I will take some photos tomorrow and post them here. I have everything still out in the car, from today's finds.

Aside of that...my brother and I were finding quite a bit of gold, in this little stretch of creek..so this area is proving to be quite an interesting find indeed. But the mystery grows kind of deeper now.

If all that single strand wire is made if gold and of silver...that would be a beautiful thing indeed...so I'll keep my fingers crossed. I now need to learn how to test suspected gold and silver for authentication purposes.

 

[Fullpan]

Placer gold, mercury, metal wafers, gold and silver (colored) wire bits - you certainly have a mystery there. Its is easy to see that environmental activism is
necessary. The fact that some corporation thought so little of polluting that river with contaniments is why the enviros have a legitimate *****. I just think
the pendulum has swung too far in their favor out in calif. anyhow. Seems that if you get caught sneezing in the rivers here, its a capital offense. Way off
topic - sorry! Anyway, keep us posted and good luck.

 

[Old_Festus]

Yes...your right. In many cases it gets a little out of control with environmental activism. I'm all for clean waters and land but today it has gone a little too far many places. . But certainly there are cases where various industries would just dump stuff down a 30' embankment, rather than dispose of it properly. Its raining so no panning today...so I'm working on trying to figure out what the factory used to do...hopefully I will soon discover what was going on.

I just watched that set of videos to recover the flour gold using mercury...pretty neat and simple too. I can now better understand how prospectors might take charged mercury right to the creek to collect gold out of their pan and accidentally drop it down into the water.

Now I just have to dig all my welding supplies out of the garage and rig up a similar contraption. Its good for the environment and lets you keep the mercury to use over and over.

 

[Old_Festus]

I found out that the building was once part of a paper mill company, that was around since the 1860's. It underwent various changes until it finally shut down in the mid to late 1960's. My father-in-law grew up in this area and recalls that since the EPA had stepped in back in the 60's and shut them down due to the environmental contamination they were creating. Unfortunately, he cant recall any specifics about what went on, when the EPA had stepped in.

 

[neighbors75]

paper mills produced Dioxins as a by product of their operations.

 

[Old_Festus]

Unfortunately all those gold and silver (colored) wire bits turned out to be attracted to a magnet. Oh well...it would have been a nice find indeed.
I'm still finding quite a bit of mercury though. I need to buy a little snuffer type device, to make collecting it a little easier.

 

[Fullpan]

Too bad about the wire bits. On the other thing, dredgers i knew would have three snuffer bottles when working Hg "hotspots" in Ca. Most everybody agrees
with the USGS report that there's nearly a million lbs of Hg laying in the rivers from old mining days. So when the guys encounter Hg, during clean-up they
try to snuff up clean gold in one, partially amalgamated in the second, and shiny clean beads of Hg in the third snuffer bottle. If you are recovering decent amounts of gold (say over a gram/day) this system works well over time where you just mess with it one time a season.
P.S. - I'm starting to think the source of mercury is farther upstream, not the paper factory.

 

[Oakview2]

A quick test to see if your found mercury is holding any gold. Take a gold pan full of water, put a fine pieces of cheese cloth or a old chamois works best in the pan. Put on some gloves and pour your bottle of found HG into the chamois. Tighten it up and squeeze the excess out excess, hopefully some gold will be left and then it can be retorted, an mercury save and recylced... Hope to see some gold soon. Good health and good hunting. You have a very interesting spot, keep looking and at the very least you will be doing a great thing for the stream, and hopefully find some answers and some gold

Too bad about the wire bits. On the other thing, dredgers i knew would have three snuffer bottles when working Hg "hotspots" in Ca. Most everybody agrees
with the USGS report that there's nearly a million lbs of Hg laying in the rivers from old mining days. So when the guys encounter Hg, during clean-up they
try to snuff up clean gold in one, partially amalgamated in the second, and shiny clean beads of Hg in the third snuffer bottle. If you are recovering decent amounts of gold (say over a gram/day) this system works well over time where you just mess with it one time a season.
P.S. - I'm starting to think the source of mercury is farther upstream, not the paper factory.

 

[Frank D.]

I think I know this spot you are talking of. Been there quite a few times lately, and have found those wires in hard rock also. Built a crusher and took some of the rocks i was interested in home, and ran them through my crusher. Then I panned all the fine crushed rock and found those same wires. Didn't have any gold colored ones, but had the rusted ones, and others that had the look of silver. Also found stibnite that looked similiar in color. Those wires stay in the pan with the heavies. Also found alot of silver/gray looking metal with the heavies. Some look like Iridium and Platinum, but not sure yet. The ones that look like iridium are really silvery with a flashy shine. They arent magnetic, but the ones that are more steel gray looking and not as flashy are slightly magnetic. Kinda like what I read about platinum with iron content. Under a 60x loupe they all have a crystal like structure that reminds me of photos on the net of platinum and Iridium. Not sure what it is yet, but trying to figure it out. Those little balls of mercury you are finding were also in some rock I crushed. Some looked like the color of mercury, and some were more dirty rusted looking also. The dirtier ones seemed to act a little bit chunky in the pan, but the more cleaner mercury looking ones seemed a little bit lighter in weight as they didn't bunch up and bind up with the black sands like the rusty ones seemed to do. Also found some flaky very thin schards of metal with a shiny gold look to them . They also were the last in the pan. Not sure what any of it is, but this all came from crushing up some of the crystaline rocks and pegmatite that are all over the place there if it's the same place I'm thinking.