Hunt4gold - First prospecting adventures and beyond

[Au dave]

what amazes me is the amount of bs you guys get ... the 2 main crks I dig have zero (maybe 1tsp) per 8 bucket cleanout but heaps of haematite chunks.Just fortunate I guess that my take home cons are pretty easy to process. It will be interesting to see what changes when I go further East later in the year. Promising looking cons btw H4G....

Sent from my GT-I9305 using Tapatalk

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

A History of Mining on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska - Grab it through Amazon!

[KevinInColorado]

what amazes me is the amount of bs you guys get ... the 2 main crks I dig have zero (maybe 1tsp) per 8 bucket cleanout but heaps of haematite chunks.Just fortunate I guess that my take home cons are pretty easy to process. It will be interesting to see what changes when I go further East later in the year. Promising looking cons btw H4G....

Sent from my GT-I9305 using Tapatalk

The large amount of black sand there drove the original gold rush prospectors away. They complained that it was too hard to clean their gold and moved on to easier diggin's. As a result we have virgin material to dig!

 

[shofs]

Great examination on our dig from the other day! I look forward to your cleanout and our next outing. Maybe at the "Clay Creek" location we talked about?

 

[GoldpannerDave]

Got out Jan 11th to a nice 50 degree sunny day here is south Denver. Gotta love the mild days here in Denver while we can drive 90 minutes and ski in 12" of new powder with a 60" base. Awesome!
Working the same area as last post, but got down to bedrock, which was about 2 feet deep in the stream bed.
View attachment 1401491

Bazooka setup:
View attachment 1401502

One thing I will try and start posting about is the stream morphology I am working. I am working on mapping/locating areas where there are alluvial outcrops along the stream (cobbles from 1" to 15") and either a good clay bed or bedrock for gold to collect on. As you can see, this spot has great cobbles, and as mentioned, bedrock under a 1-2 foot layer of sorted cobbles. This spot is the upper end of an inside bend point bar. Also discovered a 4" thick clay layer that comes in about 1/3 of the way down from the top of the point bar, near the bank. The clay bed has about a foot of course gravel (pea-size to 1") on it. Turned out to be a pretty good trap for gold. Most of the gold-bearing material was in the bottom 6" of gravel in the clay bed, and throughout the sorted cobbles down to bedrock. However, I believe that that the larger flakes were skimmed off the bed rock surface.

Here is a photo of the cons from the Bazooka from that day - will hopefully process these early next week.
View attachment 1401501

Looks like another nice result will be forthcoming. It was a teaching day so I did not even think about trying to get in the water (well, let's be honest--I did think about it but knew it was not possible. Sigh). Now (Saturday) we are getting large snow flakes drifting down and the ground is already covered.

 

[Hunt4gold]

AuDave, like Kevin described, this area (and many areas of Colorado) have a lot of black sands. One good thing is that in this area it is a good indicator for locating gold. A minute of work with a magnet cleans it up nicely though. Will process these cons tomorrow and see what the results are.

 

[Hunt4gold]

Finally completed processing the cons from my Jan. 11th outing (last posting above). Panned out the cons, processing about 1 1/2 tablespoons at a time.
Here's a photo of the first tablespoon plus of cons in the pan...


Ended up with a nice collection of flakes including a few pickers and all the way down to a nice amount of -50, -100.


My close-up photo was taken with the new clip-on macro lens kit for my iPhone.

Final weight for the day came in at 1.17 grams - one of my better days.

 

[KevinInColorado]

I'm going to start calling you "Mr Honey hole"!

 

[Johnnybravo300]

Awesome! That's a solid turn out!

 

[Hunt4gold]

Just finished up processing the Bazooka cons from my trip (Jan 12th) out with Tnetter Shofs. Ended up with 1.55 grams.
Had a great time with ya Shofs - lets get out again soon...


Liking my new scale.


Hope to get out soon. More to come...

 

[Goldfleks]

That's some beautiful gold. Wish my pans were as heavy

 

[Hunt4gold]

Got out yesterday with friends KevinInColorado and Shofs for a few hours of prospecting.
After breaking up the ice we got down to business feeding material into the sluices - looked like a Bazooka commercial.
--

We were working on cleaning up material from bedrock and off of a layer of clay.
Had some nice color in first Bazooka clean out.


In one spot I started pulling out lead shot and a .22 caliber bullet. Here is what I captured that day.


Ended up with a little over .4 grams.


All in all, great time out with friends on a sunny Colorado day.

 

[Goldfleks]

Looking good guys.

 

[Hunt4gold]

That's some beautiful gold. Wish my pans were as heavy

Thanks Goldfleks, as hard as you are working at prospecting, you'll hit pay dirt soon. Can't wait to see the photos.

 

[shofs]

Great looking gold! It looks like where you were digging was definitely a good spot and would make a guess it has more to give. Finding big heavies like that .22 round on that creek always gets me excited!

 

[Hunt4gold]

Had yet another sunny, warm day in Colorado, so I got out for a few hours digging the streams for that yellow stuff.
I'm going to try and provide a little more information about the spots I am prospecting - for this post I tried to create a reasonable cross-section of the stream where I'm digging. The illustration shows the stream in map view, where I'm digging on inside bend, stream bed stratigraphy, and where I was finding gold.


The source of the gold is the Castle Rock Conglomerate formation, of which there are remnants at this location and outcrops upstream from this spot. The stream bed at this inside bend is made up of coarse sands, gravels, cobbles, and fairly large rocks (some as large as 1'-2' in size). The larger rocks provide decent traps for the gold, especially along the inside bend. At this spot, there is an outcropping of bedrock (shaly sandstone) that is one to two feet below the gravels.

You can see the sandstone outcrop in this photo of the Bazooka in the stream (upper left corner).


As one would expect, the gold was more concentrated in the gravels towards the inside bend of the stream - from about mid-stream to the point bar. However, there was color in my test pans along the cut-bank side within the gravels sitting right on top of the bedrock. I scraped off the top few inches of the course sandstone and found nice color in it also. The other material holding gold was the few inches of sandy soil sitting on top of the hard clay layer covering part of the inside bend. This actually has some really nice color. Unfortunately, the clay layer in other sections of this creek is really soft and is hard to scrape off material above it.

Was out for about two and a half hours, and cleaned out the Bazooka three times - mostly just to see if I was still on the gold as I dug across the creek, and then working the material above the clay bed.
Photos of cons from three clean-outs:






Will process the cons by end of week and post...

 

[KevinInColorado]

Nice artwork and education...and gold!

 

[Hunt4gold]

Processed cons from my last outing - post and photos above.
I believe the greater percentage of the gold was concentrated in the gravels between the bedrock and clay bed on the inside bend. There was about 5 inches of gravel separating the two, with the gap pinching out towards the inside bend (highlighted in yellow below).


Gold from that outing. Amazing how thin some of the flakes are...


Weather has turned cold here in Denver - 10 degrees this morning. Won't be getting back out till later next week, but hope to see some outing reports from others getting out.

 

[RookmanGold]

Such beautiful gold... havnt checked in for a while... my creek is currently frozen solid... im going crazy!!!!

Still at least 1.5 months before I get out

 

[Johnnybravo300]

Yeah its fun when the gold pan ices over haha. I've had to switch to the weatherproof rubber buckets like ranchers use. They are pretty much indestructible and work great in freezing temps.
The cracking sound of a plastic bottom bucket gets old fast.

 

[shofs]

Looking at your takes it appears to be a close one-to-one ratio of the number of -50 size gold to 30-50 size. As I look back some of my photos, I am beginning to see some similar results.

...I noticed similar ratios on that creek also, so was curious as to your findings. Will check with David and see if he has noticed the same

I use -30 and -60 classifiers (as opposed to -50) so my cleanouts might look slightly different. I don't quite follow your observation of the ratio between the +&- 50 size gold however. Is it that you noting an increase of smaller gold from your last few digs as opposed to your earlier ones?