Alaskan Pay dirt

[SteveDigsGems]

Earlier this evening I decided to pan some Alaskan pay dirt that I bought from an eBay seller. I bought 1 pound for $15, and it is guaranteed to have gold, because the lady sprinkles a pinch in. I didn't get rich, but I am really happy with the experience I got out of it. I have a lot of friends that want to travel out to my local gold bearing rivers with me to sluice, but before we go, I'm probably going to have them pan some of the dirt in my backyard. It is a good opportunity for them to see how the gold behaves, and it will motivate them for the upcoming trip.





Sorry about the quality, my camera ran out of batteries, this is an iPad picture. I'll get some batteries next time I'm at the store and upload what I found.







-Steve

 

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[KevinInColorado]

Just keep learning more about your area and getting more gold...love it!

 

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[Medina Joe]

Great job. Someday i'll fine a nug like that. Keep it up

 

[GarretDiggingAz]

Things going well here. Nice little picker we got the other day. Nice of the mosquito to pose for reference. I think we have discovered through test hole that we have a depression in the bedrock ahead of us. Old waterfall maybe? Only problem is the only safe way to get the loader in there is dig from where we are. May as well process the dirt while we are at it. All has been going pretty well. We keep breaking the pull strings on the pumps for some reason, but we can deal with those kind of fixes. Last week we took a little trip to the 40 mile gold country. The lady in the gift shop let me hold the nugget they have on display. She said it was ONLY 5 lbs, but boy it felt a lot heavier than that! If only the mosquito had been there!

Funny the pic of your nugget and the mosquito was after the 5 lb'er. Huge size difference. Unless your Mosquitos are monsters. Lol
Glad to see you're up and running. I'm trying to get myself back to digging in the hills again. Just so hot here in AZ. To bad gold doesn't glow in the dark.

 

[Oakview2]

Might want to run a detector over those tailings.

 

[elkie13]

The salmon have returned to the creek. I could sit down there for hours watching them. After so many years in the ocean, they return to the very same river the were born. Nature is amazing! Seems our mining activities are really disturbing them! We even got this cool video with our little GoPro camera. The first fish you see in the video is a King (Chinook) Salmon, rare these days, the rest are Red (Sockeye)/



The water is so low and clear, my dredge is just calling my name, but alas, we have to give these guys time to spawn...

Time is running out in the season, the kid has to start school pretty soon. Of course we are having equipment problems, again!


We have a small kubota tractor we use for loading the trommel. It’s a great little tractor, but not really designed for the kind of work we are asking of it. We keep having to stop and replace pins, weld cracks, tighten bolts. Maybe we need to look into a skid steer or something for next season. And wouldn’t you know it, the pay streak is getting better and better! It’s infuriating!

While we are waiting on repairs, we are going to go on a little vacation next week, we are going to try to make it to Skagway to see the Chilkoot trail. Maybe we will find a little inspiration in walking in the footsteps of the early miners. I will try to get some good pictures for you guys.

Good Luck and happy prospecting.

 

[KevinInColorado]

My wife and I both loved the video, as cool as something on tv!

Good luck chasing that pay streak!

 

[elkie13]

a reply


With the kid back in school, we must finish our season with what time we can spare on weekend and holidays. This one cut short by yet more breakdowns and rain. The idler casters that keep the trommel from moving horizontally had to be replaced. We ripped the pull string out of our main pump, and to too it all off broke a steering hose on the backhoe.
Everything was a wet, muddy, soup.



All those beautiful salmon we videoed last time are rotting in the creek. We had to be extra vigilant about bears.
We managed to pull it together in time to run a few hours until the dark made us stop. Yes it’s starting to get dark around 9:30 pm, really a hamper to mining. :-)

Next week we are having grandma watch the kid and are going to try for a week of good runs. We are thinking of going a few days without cleaning the sluice and see how it goes. What do you guys think? We always clean it when we shut down for lunch\night but I'm not really sure its necessary.

 

[GarretDiggingAz]

Well. Cleaning the mats takes time. So if you absolutely know you won't lose gold because of start and restart of system and if the mats don't pack up. Then wait and see if you could do clean out weekly. I know I like seeing the color after my mat gets full. Maybe I need higher volume pump. Just haven't got it yet. So have higher pitch.
But the final voice is yours. You know how the sluice runs.
Actually, I've never heard anyone ask this. Do you have a last resort trap that would catch any gold that just might get caught up from restarting the flow. I guess it would be like a slurry trap (I think it's called). I've often wondered if I should incorporate this into my sluice. Though I'm pretty certain I'm catching majority of my gold. There's always the what if.
Sure seems summer has flown bye though. Went out to my digging spot up north and somebody was digging it. Plus area was flooded. So good and bad. So hoping to actually run material in about a week.
Been glad to see you've been getting some mining time in though. Dealing with dead salmon though. Must smell pretty bad. Lol.
I thought my area was bad just because of the mosquitoes. I forgot my repellant. So that trip was real short.

 

[MrWareWolf]

I bought a $15 bag from them also. It wasn't to get rich. The wife and I are new to this and since I've been practicing panning in the local river, with no results, I wanted to pan something with a little gold in it to be sure I was doing it correctly. The bag served it's purpose and was most helpful. As soon as the rivers slow down up in the mountains we'll be trying our hand at it, hopefully with good results.

I bought some paydirt (different vendor) for this exact same reason. It is cool to see that the skill I have is sufficient to find gold, when it is there to find.

I'm pretty new to this whole hobby also. Thought I would share this:
One thing I found as an unexpected surprise: After classifying to 30 mesh, I set aside those "small rocks" which didn't make it through. Then I reclassed the material that made it through twice more @ 50 and 100 mesh. Anyways, I was expecting to find ALL the gold in the smallest material. I expected to find a little less as the size of material increased, by logic.. I did find some there at the 100 mesh, but what surprised me was panning the "rocks" found me as much as all the rest did & in almost NO time. I panned the whole bundle of material over a safety pan, and I saved ALL the material I bought. I plan to go through it again in the morning, tomorrow - just for giggles. Anyways, the reason I bring it up is that from the vidz I see on the utube, many people just ignore that first class of rocks. I've even seen people just give it a couple shakes in a very wet pan, or submerged pan, and then dump it all. I spent nearly an hour going through the smallest material, and less than 5 minutes doing the "rocks".

THis is a basic breakdown of how I pan:
I found what I did from vigorously shaking the bejezuz out of the pan (stratifying), in a tight circular motion, for about 15-20 seconds. Next I move the material forward and back, about 1/2 as vigorously, watching that it is moving around really well. Finally, I tap hard on the side of the pan. The gold will jump/move toward your stationary hand, if the path is unobstructed. With the direction I was moving the gold all full of rocks, it just flashed in view for a second. Then, I used my finger to move the rocks out of the way, and a sniffer bottle to grab each flake. Then I'd repeat the whole process. When I didn't see any flashes anymore, I still moved the rocks out of the way with my finger and found no black sand and no gold.

I know I'm not supposed to say who I bought the paydirt from (& I won't break rules, on purpose), but the material was from Arizona. I picked up a pump from the same person, as well as some tubing. I spent $13 on 1lb.

My classifying screens are made to fit 5 gallon buckets & it seemed kind of silly to use these huge diameter c-pans on such a small amount of material. I used each classifier separately into a clean bucket. Yes, I could have stacked them up, as they're meant to be used. owever, I did not want to blow through the huge one pound bag in under 5 minutes.

Next paydirt order arriving is 3 lbs, & for that I will probably stack the classifying pans.

Hope this helps ya khpony, or someone else for that matter.

 

[MrWareWolf]

OH man, that is COOOL! You should consider digging the hole, to see if there might have been a tunnel down there. I suppose there could have been a latrine there though, so maybe use some machinery to dig? Anyways, thanks for the crystal pictures. Where there is quartz there will be gold nearby. You may have a great claim friend! Hope you are well, and the fam tool. T/C

 

[elkie13]

Fall is in the air. The kid is back in school. With grandma watching the kid for the week, we decided to work like dogs and try to squeeze as much out what was left of the season as we could.

We decided to try a little experiment. Normally, we clean out the sluice every time we stop the pump, for lunch, or for the night. Since we were working with a reduced crew, we decided to leave the sluice alone for a few days. Normally, we see nothing on top of the mats when we stop, but after a few days, we started to see some color. The yellow matting we use is discarded pipeline insulation material, works great for miners moss. However its hard to see the gold since it is the same color as the mat. Look closely, the gold is slightly more orange.



gold in sluiceEverything was going great, equipment working fine, gold in the sluice. We had uncovered some large rocks in the dig site, always a good sign. We were disappointed in the rainy weather, but with a full set of rain gear on, we managed to stay warm. Then minutes into the last run on the second day, we heard a loud "snap" from the little Kubota tractor we use for loading the trommel. We had broken the loader for what seemed like the 100th time this year. This is a great tractor, but not really built for what we are asking it to do.













Resigned, we cleaned the sluice. We ran the cons though the mini highbanker. There was so much black sand and the entire black mat was covered with gold. At this point we were navigating by flashlight, so held the panning until daylight and toasted the end of our season by the light of the fire. We got somewhat toasted ourselves I might add...




The next morning we panned the concentrates and were pleased by the results. We called around trying to locate a replacement loader, but Alaska is a hard place to find parts, especially for an early 90's model Kubota. We decided to head for home and see if we could fix it ourselves and maybe salvage a day or two of the week.

 

[elkie13]

We had visitors while we were at home trying to fix our broken tractor. This was found down by the river were we pump water.

You will remember in our last update we decided to go home and try to fix the tractor. Our normal welder extraordinaire is out of state, but we gave it a go anyway. We couldn’t have been happier with the result.

We felt there just may have been time to save the last day this week of mining. We rushed right back up to the claim and got to work. We managed to get the paydirt we had stockpiled run and got a little gold to show for it. On the way home, we almost hit a brown bear with our truck. The sow bolted right out in front of us and the cub right behind our bumper. Wonder if it was the same bear that visited?

A few days ago we won an auction for a little skid steer bobcat that we are hoping may be able to take over for this poor old Kubota. It needs work, but we won it for the unbelievable price of 5600 from a local oilfield surplus company. We may have much less down time next season.

Going back up next week to mine some more, stay tuned.

 

[elkie13]

Were back for 2015! sort of...


We got an early start on the season, we had very little snow this winter, which meant we didn't have to wait for the thaw. Armed with a couple of new toys, including a mini excavator and a sluice we had welded just for us. The sluice has four leveling jacks, and a nugget trap.

The excavator is the best purchase we ever made, I don't know how we lived without it. It loads faster, and has the ability to easily go up in the woods to dig test holes. We run more material in a day than we used to in three, run the dirt more evenly, and are much less worn out at the end of the day. We found a new test spot up in the woods that looks promising.

The first week we were going great until the water pump died, back to town, but we managed to rent one at a reasonable price from the folks who were repairing ours. Next, we had a mishap with one of the controls getting caught on a piece of clothing, and rammed the bucket through the grizzly, sigh.. back to town.

We had our friend the welder weld us a new grizzly like we always wanted with a steeper angle, everything was going great. This is a short days find.




The next day, I'm ready to move from the digsite to the washplant to start running material, and the excavator wont move. Final Drive is shot. Let me tell you, removing the track so we could take the part to town was not fun. I knew there was a reason I bought that three ton hoist!






So here we are with nice weather and nothing to do, we decided to try out the hooka and dry suit we got off craigslist and do a little dredging. There is a short window of time we are permitted to do this so as not to disturb the salmon fry, we've never had the conditions be right to give it a go. If you are interested in dredging, take my advice and try on the suit you are going to buy. It was too small, it took three people to squeeze me into it, and leaked like a sieve. In these mountain fed streams, I believe that the water temperature is somewhere approaching the liquid temperature of nitrogen. Got about twenty minutes in before the current and the cold temperatures defeated me. Its a whole new world under the water, I forgot how much I loved doing that, I just need a better suit.







So we are waiting on the new final drive, a little broker, a little wiser, but still damn greatful we get to do this.

 

[arizau]

Who says that the series Gold Rush is scripted? You guys are living it.

Good report. Good luck, have fun, be safe and find more gold!

 

[INDEAD]

Update?

I have enjoyed your adventures Elkie, please update( or start your own Journal?)!!!!!!

 

[Bonaro]

You want to get rid of the bubble in the vial?? After putting the gold in the vial, put the bottle and cap completely under water to fill the vial. Tap the lid and vial to shake loose small bubbles before screwing the cap on while still under water. No bubbles! Remember, water expands when frozen and will break a glass vial. TTC

Yep, that is exactly how you remove the bubble but.....dont do it. If you lay the completely filled vial in the dash of your car (or any other hot place), expansion will blow the bottom off your vial. Then you will be vacuuming the car and panning the dirt to get your gold back.
The bubble is a good thing

 

[elkie13]

Hey Everyone!

I have to really apologise for not updating you all in a while. Sometimes when stuff is going so bad, its really hard to talk about. Remember a few posts back we had to get a new final drive for the excavator? We ordered the new drive got it installed, everything was great. Then the bolts all sheared off for some reason and we ruined that brand new 3k dollar drive. That’s pretty much when I stopped updating you.

All is better now, got another new final drive, and with the help of the final drive vendor we got the pieces we needed to get the one we ruined rebuilt. They even helped us diagnose what may have happened to cause the bolts to shear (track tension setting wrong in the owners manual). I don't think I'm allowed to post a link to their site but if you ever need a final drive for a mini excavator contact me and I'll point you in the right direction.

Also at the same time the starter died on our backhoe, got a new one right away. But it turned out that they accidentally sold us some old core they had sitting around. It was intermittent and we replaced just about everything on the starting system before we realized. Then getting the folks that sold it to us to give us a new starter was a huge fight. This all cost us weeks of down time.

But none of this is what you want to hear about is it? You want to hear about the nugget. We’ve hit upon a bedrock ledge, in that ledge we found a depression and that’s where this little guy came from. I’ll never forget this this shining in the sun when I looked at the sluice box. (Sorry my phone was dead, no photo). We got as much gold in that one day as we normally get in two. You may remember that I have mentioned our area was heavily glaciated and we are more likely to get flat pressed out flakes than nuggets like this. Maybe then you'll understand why we are so excited.

Cant wait to get back in there and see if this guy has any big brothers.

 

[Jeff95531]

Thanks for checking in elkie13. Been a tough season for many of us here but that nugget is what's it all about. Update us a little more when the snow sets in.

 

[elkie13]

You know what? There's hardly any snow, the sun is shining. I think we should start getting ready for mining season! I feel and early spring coming on!

 

[Jeff95531]

HEY! Look who's back! Ya know...the first gold ever to run thru my LeTrap was from you. Got any stories to tell from 2015?