Another "where would you dig?"... DESERT style... Ground level pics.

[bobw53]

I'm not sure how to describe this..

Gold bearing area, its not huge, its not California or even Arizona.. It was hit HARD from the 1870's and up. Gold rush town and all.

Lots of hard rock, and lots of placer.. Hard rock to the west, placer to the east.. Dry land dredge and all that to the east.. Looks
like piles of intestines left over. However, I think they missed something.. to the south east. Over a hundred years after the rush,
rains and floods have cut their way into desert meadows and shallow desert valleys and have exposed some pretty gravels and created
new arroyos... AND GOLD!!!

So I've been playing around in that gravel layer for a while. And its been pretty damn good. HARD digging, but its the best
gold I've found so far...

10 buckets, half to two thirds full... This doesn't hurt my feeling any. 20-50 and 50-80.

Horrible pic, but I can see the layer... If you were standing there, you could see it. See where the score marks of the pick STOP... That's where the
layer STARTS. .

So I went out on Friday.. Looking at something "new".. About a mile further from "the source". Where the water finally decided to drop and
CUT into the ground... and there is that gravel again. WAY FAR off the beaten path.. I only grabbed 4 really short buckets off the
bottom, easy digging stuff. Sucked, but better than some other places I've tried. This area hasn't been under claim in over 20 years.

That layer is a little thin and narrow here, over on the left... CAMO dog on the right (why I try and put her yellow vest on her, when I can find it
she blends in to the desert background way too well).

Spin around 180 degrees and walk 20 feet and we(I) have this.. That wall on the bottom right looks pretty sexy to me. That layer
of big heavy gravel.

I think its worth at least 2 more trips.. DIGGING into that gravel... See whats there...
Sad thing is, the pics don't do those cuts any justice, they make them look a lot wider and
shallower than they are.

This cut is well over the top of my head, and it doesn't look that way.. And its maybe 8 foot
wide. Gets HOT down there... There was a nice breeze Friday afternoon, you don't
get any of that down in those cuts, just the heat, kicks you in the nuts.... And no
my dog doesn't have a tail.. She came that way, I didn't do it, and everything on my
coffee table is thankful.

Front end of the dog, with one of the other dogs.... And NO!!!!! it wasn't my idea to get a chihuahua, but he's cool... Spud-Lee.
His rapper name is "Little-Arf-Arf".

 

[No gold in NY]

From the looks of your pans, you have no problem as to where to look. Good luck out there and bring water for the dog.

 

[mike(swWash)]

That's some sweet and sweaty looking ground you have there....dig man, dig

 

[dave wiseman]

Get down to bedrock and clean out the crevices and you'll get 100 times what's in your pan if it came from that arroyo.Be sure to break the cracks open and sweep with a dry paint brush.

 

[Bejay]

Get down to bedrock and clean out the crevices and you'll get 100 times what's in your pan if it came from that arroyo.Be sure to break the cracks open and sweep with a dry paint brush.

Possibly! But having been an active placer miner in Oregon for a lot of years I found the desert landscape to be a completely different depositional process. Water is intermittent and often the gold does not get down to bedrock, but rather is deposited in a pay layer. One only needs to watch the occasional flooding that occurs in desert climates to see that the 24-7 flow of water that we see in "Non-Desert" locales causes a layered effect of "placers bearing gold."

My 1st few years mining in the desert employed digging deep to bedrock; only to find that I went past the pay layer. Of course there are "stream courses" in the desert that have cut down to bedrock and allowed gold deposition to occur; on and within the bedrock.....but often that is simply not the case. My personal experience has shown that the desert, and the non-desert deposition of gold is completely different. But of course I was a dredge miner in the Great Northwest where water was a mainstay....and the desert proved me to often be mistaken. My opinion is "stay with the pay layer...identify what the characteristics are and follow that.

Bejay

 

[cosmetal]

Possibly! But having been an active placer miner in Oregon for a lot of years I found the desert landscape to be a completely different depositional process. Water is intermittent and often the gold does not get down to bedrock, but rather is deposited in a pay layer. One only needs to watch the occasional flooding that occurs in desert climates to see that the 24-7 flow of water that we see in "Non-Desert" locales causes a layered effect of "placers bearing gold."

My 1st few years mining in the desert employed digging deep to bedrock; only to find that I went past the pay layer. Of course there are "stream courses" in the desert that have cut down to bedrock and allowed gold deposition to occur; on and within the bedrock.....but often that is simply not the case. My personal experience has shown that the desert, and the non-desert deposition of gold is completely different. But of course I was a dredge miner in the Great Northwest where water was a mainstay....and the desert proved me to often be mistaken. My opinion is "stay with the pay layer...identify what the characteristics are and follow that.

Bejay

Having dredged in No CA and being a born desert rat from AZ, I totally agree with your assessment. Hit the pay streak hard and heavy!

Nice pics . . . bring back fond memories of “ratting” around with my mining engineer uncle. I saw the pans and buckets – do you classify your dirt on site? Didn’t see any screens.

Best chilies in the US are grown in Hatch. Man, you got good things going for you – desert gold and chilies! In the Sacramento area, I can’t even use a shovel here anymore. Just hands and gold pan!

James

 

[bobw53]

Having dredged in No CA and being a born desert rat from AZ, I totally agree with your assessment. Hit the pay streak hard and heavy!

Nice pics . . . bring back fond memories of “ratting” around with my mining engineer uncle. I saw the pans and buckets — do you classify your dirt on site? Didn’t see any screens.

Best chilies in the US are grown in Hatch. Man, you got good things going for you — desert gold and chilies! In the Sacramento area, I can’t even use a shovel here anymore. Just hands and gold pan!

James

Got to have the chile.. This is the best time of year.. You can smell the green chiles roasting down the street.

dave wiseman

Get down to bedrock and clean out the crevices and you'll get 100 times what's in your pan if it came from that arroyo.Be sure to break the cracks open and sweep with a dry paint brush.

Easier said than done... And here is the weird thing.. A LOT of times, the best gold out here is sitting right on the top..

On the claim my Dad and I have, its right close to where actual documented veins are.. If you scour the hill side, and hill
tops you can find traces of spider veins (by the type of rock)... And according to what I've read, the entire area has
eroded down about 1000ft over the past 35-70 million years..

Literally do nothing but scrape the top inch or 2 on a hill side or a hill top and get gold (fine flour).. Go any deeper than 2 inches,
and there is absolutely NOTHING... Did that this spring.. Right on a hill top, where I KNOW a spider was at one time.. Just
for fun scraped up the top few inches, just a few buckets and got over 400 pieces of gold.... REALLY tiny stuff. -120 and -250.
You would need 1000s of pieces for it to even register on a scale.

You'll find that in some of the arroyos also.. And Mark.. over in the journal section has found the same thing.. Its like
the water, when there is some, and possibly the wind move the lights off and concentrates the gold right at the
surface. Its completely Bass Ackwards from conventional gold thinking.. Its weird..

Now this gravel layer thing.. Its kind of new to me.. Though digging through old reports.. In some spots they've drilled
down over 800 feet... And they are still in that gravel layer, pulling about 1/2 gram a yard.

In this area, there were 2 "events" one about 30 million years ago, and one about 70 million.... I think this gravel
pre-dates those events.. The gold is different, and its BIGGER... Gold that is eroding from the veins, gold near
"the source" is very seldom +50, very tiny amounts of even +80, not a lot of +120, its mostly in the 120-250 mesh
range...

Now in this gravel.. If you don't get overburden in your bucket, there is almost nothing -80...(or +20) This spring my
Dad kept INSISTING the Gold Cube was broken because there was no tiny stuff coming out of that gravel layer.

Ton of TINY stuff in the overburden though...

And classifying.. YES.. Through trial and error, I've found the best way to dig this is to break up as much as
I can with the pick... Then toss out the big rocks, bigger than a baseball size or so... Then go to town with
the shovel through a 1/2" classifier.

 

[arizau]

Just a suggestion assuming that you are bucket classifying (or not?) the buckets of material you are processing. It is pretty easy to construct a screen classifier that you can prop up and shovel on to. Collect the under size on a small piece of heavy duty plastic or a tarp placed beneath the screen. Quarter or half inch openings will probably suffice for your use while still collecting appropriately sized dirt clods that may have gold trapped inside them. I built a small, very light weight, fold up one that I can carry or attach to my backpack Whippet dry washer when I go out and it makes my efforts much more productive.

Side note: As a native New Mexican I miss the best Mexican food (Las Cruces and North along the Rio Grande) and chiles in the world.

 

[arizau]

Oops, just saw you are shoveling through a classifier(?).