Looking to strike it upper middle class...

[SaltwaterServr]

Quick history. I started prospecting in April of 2015 after moving to Arizona for a new career. I've always loved geology and gold held a unique interest for me from the earliest age I can remember. My uncle lived out here and taught me a little bit about prospecting, but 99% of what I do is self-taught.

Anyway, I'm going to skip my first year and a half and fast forward to 9-27 of 2016...

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I've been fighting this odd stomach bug all week. Started off on Tuesday with what I thought was food poisoning, but the dang thing keeps hanging around. Anyway, four trips to the commode Saturday morning put me behind a bit.

I went out and mapped the third level of the Dollar mine. It's somewhere around 185-190 feet give or take. The mineralization is pretty poor up there. It seems the vein falls apart but there is one oddball mineral pocket.



Oh, a few bats in there before I got up to the third level. Don't ask me how I figured it out, I just thought that noise would work.



I did find one small deposit of copper in between the main and second level near the face of the mine. It's about 3/32" thick, give or take and has some azurite there too. Meh.





At this point I think the Dollar is pretty played out overall. We're going to test drill it to make sure and I'm going to get down into this winze.



Well, at some point Dan and I are going to start rapelling into and out of mine shafts, probably starting next weekend. I thought I would try it out solo in a 50' raise that has a few obstacles in it, just like the real deal. The raise is all within the first minute of this video.



What I did was get up to the third level above that platform and tie off my rope there. Then I went down and ascended using this technique:



It's really easy once you get the tether from the top ascender to the harness the right size. Ascending is easy. Controlled rappelling is easy.

You know what ain't easy? Changing the gear from ascending to rappelling while you're still on the rope. Did I get stuck? Yeah. For about 15 minutes trying to figure it out. Was I all the way up almost to the platform? Again, yeah. I dig manage to swing over to one side beam and hoist myself up and switch the gear.

Once I got home I figured out what I did wrong. When I took the Croll off, I should've made sure to leave a long lead on the hand ascender. then I could take up slack through the Stop and disconnect the Ascender. Silly mistake. Really, we'll have very limited reason to every switch from ascending to rappelling, it'll be the other way around. It's still a skill to have.

I did head over to the Rattler mine area and pick up two heaping buckets of death ore. It's the stuff that is full of arsenopyrite. It's sitting outside waiting to be processed in a few weeks.

I would post more but I got sidetracked by 3 articles on froth flotation. You'll see more of that and what it entails this winter as I get into more technical gold recovery.

 

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[SaltwaterServr]

Dan and I headed out yesterday intent on visiting four places only. This time around though, we'd be going down into the shafts of abandoned mines.

How dangerous were they? How deep do they go? What are we going to find if anything??

Dan doing Dan things.



We stopped by an old copper mine so Dan could get a look at a copper vein still in the rock. You can see the light blue running up the face just to the left of center.



First up, we hit the 231 mine that had the remnants of the wood headframe rotting out above the shaft. I rigged up to go down and check her out.



Heading down...



Getting a good look into the shadows...



Got to the bottom, and while I ain't no George Lucas, I prefer to show y'all videos...



The timber down there was pretty stout. No idea how much further down she might go. The quartz stringers look like they play out. Further up the mine on the way out.



The orange shards turned out to be wulfenite. I didn't get any photos of it.

Then we (I) almost rolled the quad again.



We stopped on the way to the Green Mountain Mine then to have lunch. I forgot plates. Who needs 'em when you have brand new Home Depot bucket lids? Dan took the photo, I have more mustard on mine.



We messed around at the Green Mountain Mine for about two hours. You probably know I wear a cowboy hard hat so my ears and neck don't get burned. I can tell you that when you spend the afternoon looking down at the ground, you'll still get sun-fried ears and neck.

We were looking for the source of this little feller right here.



I was fairly certain that it came from the Green Mountain Mine, but when I was out there this summer I couldn't find anything resembling it.

Dan and I started about 200-300 yards to the northwest of the mine along the ridge that encloses the wash system it drains into. We both had flags to mark when we found any iron containing quartz specimens that look like this:



or anything we found looking like the close up photo. We call those four rocks "bbq chicken ore" because it sort of looks like the skin of barbequed chicken that has been basted with bbq sauce.

The thing is, that unoxidized ore isn't found above ground. I was worried that there might've been a few pieced dropped by the original miners and we would be looking at really nothing.

We get up top and we're finding pieces of the bbq chicken ore here and there but nothing really of note. We stopped and looked at the pattern of flags and figured out that it was all coming from the west of us still.

I started down into a wash then, and Dan started working west along the ridgeline. 2, maybe 3 minutes he radios to me that he's found something. I come over and he's found a barely exposed copper outcrop. I mean, the samples we're seeing are a few millimeters above the surface dirt maximum. The loose pieces of the vein are scattered a bit but we finally lined them up and figured out where the vein was running. It was kind of tough tracing it because it really was 99% buried still. We had several spots we had to kick dirt or dig to find the vein again...

Here's a few of the malachite specimens we found.



(continued in next post)

 

[SaltwaterServr]

You might be able to tell from that last photo that there's also some peridotite in the image. That's a give away we're in a greenstone belt formation. Good stuff for copper and gold.

Well, we get over to the actual exploration hole that was previously dug and I filmed in the summer. Except this time, in the tailings pile, we found the source of the pyrite unoxidized material!

Dan dug out a piece about the size of a soccer ball just solid arsenopyrite. Smelled like garlic so it was a sure thing it wasn't mica. Oh baby, we found something now!

Here's the vein in the ground looking from SW to NE. You can almost make out the unoxidized layer dead center of the vein itself.



The vein does appear to pinch down going into the ground, but the side we're standing on doesn't appear to pinch down at all. So we found our potentially good vein to mine this season!

We're going back next Saturday to dig at the face for some pieces to send off for assaying to see if we really do have something or not.

Last night, I traced out the spots we marked as the vein trended to the southwest. The spots we have marked, not all of them shown, line up on the vein that is on both sides of the pit. You can see how long that vein is, and who knows how deep it goes at this point. Regardless, we're damned excited about this one.

(I'm not including the image here as it has too many indicators of where the actual Green Mountain Mine is.)

Our day wasn't remotely over and we still had two more mines we wanted to get down into.

This is the 232, another one I found last spring and video'd this summer.



Really interesting that they didn't go left or right, only straight down in the shaft. This vein system goes for 800' or so with the 233 mine on the same vein.

On the way down into the 232.



Checking out the dense limonite deposits.



So off to the 233.

Dan wanted to get into one too, so I let him take this one on. Yup, that's a pool noodle. We use them to keep the rocks from abrading the rope.



Dan ran into a problem pretty early. As in the two mines I was in, there's a lot of loose rock on the sides of the shaft. This one had a stull (wood brace) in the center of it with some rock balanced on it pretty precariously. He wisely decided not to mess with it and baled out.




After that it was getting late. He wanted to go back to the Dollar Mine and look at it again. I thought it was a good idea so we hauled butt over there to get my ladders that we'll need for the Verde pit.

We didn't get there until after dark and pulled down the ladders. Dan and I pretty much decided our excitement over the Dollar was a lot due to the size of it. The remaining ore pales in comparison to the stuff we were looking at in the other mines.

Here's a sample of the "death ore" that put Dan in bed for 3-4 days. You can see that once you get passed the surface, it's full of arsenopyrite.

Sorry for the sniffles on it. I was way off on the gold content of arsenopyrite ores. The Chemistry of Gold Extraction by Marsden and House states that it can have up to 15,200 grams per ton which is 488 troy ounces per ton of ore.



Until next time...

 

[SaltwaterServr]

There's good weekends in prospecting, there's tough weekends...

Yesterday about wore me out. The plan was to run up to the Dollar mine, get the 20' ladder out, scavenge some of the lumber, and then run it all over to the Green Mountain Mine.

While at the GMM, I wanted to do a bit more exploring of that hill. Here it is from Google Earth, with the 2011 satellite images. You can see the various color differences in the exposed rock layers.



And here's what really has my attention, this string of rock that curves away from the GMM Pit.



Off then to the Dollar. Got to the site where I offload the trailer/ATV and realized I didn't fuel up the ATV. Checked it, still plenty of gas.

Picked up the 20' of ladder and I didn't bother with scavenging any lumber. That'll be a full day effort with two people so I skipped that and also left my 3 55 gallon drums in the mine for now.

It turns out my ATV just doesn't have quite enough power to get it up all the hills with all my gear and the ladders as well. Kinda got stuck three times. Here I ended up rolling backwards into the gulley at left where the trailer pinned the ATV. I had to put that big rock behind the tire, hit it hard in first gear, and get the rock to fall and chock the ATV in place. Once I did that, I could unhitch the trailer from the ATV. Rolled the trailer down the hill by hand, rehitched, and ran the 30' of ladder back to the GMM by itself.



Turns out the pit is about 13' deep. Absolutely fascinating geology that I had no idea of until I got down into it. Crappy video:



North side of the vein.



South side and the overlying tailings pile.



Bottom of the south side, where something lives on occasion.



And the North side snake area, where something definitely lives. I was tempted to smoke it out of there, but I thought, do I really know where all the holes are? This is a job for Dan to mess with.



One piece of odd ore. No idea what is happening in that rock.



Oh, I did manage to:

1. completely rip off one of the trailer tail lights
2. Roll the ATV with the trailer attached
3. Tear off the grease fitting collar on one of the trailer hubs
4. Snap one of the bolts that holds the trailer spring in place
5. Come home beat up and sore as all get out.

Dan has his jeep up and running finally so we're going to drag the trailer behind it from here on out and use the ATV as a needed shuttle. There's no way the ATV can get the generator up to the mill shack to start work on it.

I did manage to bring home four more buckets of death ore before the day was done.

This past week I did manage to nail down the process by which we're going to work our ore in the shack. I mean I knew how I was going to do it from a conceptual point of view, but this week was actual sketching the build out and plumbing systems for each section of processing.

From our crushing stage we're going to oxidize the ore with 7% H2O2, then let it sit for 12 hours with 2 molar HCl with 20 grams per liter of NaCl added. After that, two stages of filtering to get the gold solution from the solids. Next step is to put activated carbon in the gold solution to adsorb the gold to the carbon. The carbon then gets washed with distilled water, and incinerated. The ashes are then smelted into gold buttons which get made into bars. Those bars are shipped to a refinery for final processing.

EDIT: Oh yeah, the yellow dotted line.

I traced it following the trail I drew on my GPS. I don't know what to think of it. I did find another test pit up the hill that lines up with it. Also found a spot with more arsenopyrite ore about 40 feet off the northeast edge of that dotted line. Good times.

 

[SaltwaterServr]

How I find my ore...Sunday's videos (10-24-2016)

After last Saturday's damage to the trailer I couldn't make it out this Saturday. Thank goodness for the Cowboy's bye week. One of the tires on the trailer came off the hub while sitting in the garage. Fixed that Saturday, turned out to be a loose valve core. Replaced all the trailer lights and rewired the harness.

I went out Sunday for a few hours to get into the Green Mountain Mine pit and do a bit of digging. I wanted to see what the vein looked like under the loose rock and dirt, or if there even was one there. I also was going to map out all the flagged areas to see if I could find a trend in the vein systems on that hill. Finally I wanted to pick up as much arsenopyrite ore out of the mine and off the tailings pile as I could.

Once I got out to the GMM, I unexpectedly decided to make a little video series on what I look for in ore. It wasn't about 5 minutes into the first video that I really decided to make it a how-to video.



I do actually think all of the spots I have flagged and point out in the above video are a connected vein system. Why? I mapped a few surface veins yesterday and they all trend about the same direction.

Second video, finding a vein I didn't know about on the hill.



A picture of the new vein going up the hill.



And the third video where I figure something out about my area.



So I got down in the pit eventually. Built me a little fire and threw some longer sticks on it to place into the snake den holes. Let it burn a few minutes then started to smoke out the snakes. One thing I noticed, the sun hits that side of the pit late in the day so it stays nice and warm to the touch. Perfect little spot if you're a slithering critter.

Right away I could see that several holes were connected, and as I suspected there were holes that I couldn't see from in the pit. Two random spots on that rock face started to smoke so I stuck some sticks in there too. Then I sat back cracked open a gatorade and had the Glock at the ready.

And then......

Nothing happened. I did put a burning stick in hole right where my ladder comes down and Ill be damned if I didn't smell something organic burning in there. No snakes popped out though.

I did take the rotary hammer down in there and chiseled away at both sides of the exposed rock faces. Didn't find anything I was looking for other than some really nice black quartz. That I dropped. And smashed. Oops.

Last week I did pick up some specimens out of the bottom of the pit that have arsenopyrite it them. It didn't occur to me that being down in that pit for decades and decades, the surface pyrites will have weathered and oxidized. The garlic smell wouldn't be there unless I wetted the samples. Another oops because I didn't bring any samples home from the pit itself.

Anyway, I decided at one point to start digging in the center of the pit to see how much rubble there was so I could maybe expose the top of the vein.

Huh. A little deeper than I would've thought, and not much rock. All of the dirt is really loose too. No clumps, nothing.



Final progress. You can see the far red face where I chiseled the rock out. The hole ended up being a little taller than two five gallon buckets stacked inside of each other. I did end up hitting a rock down there, but it's a loose rock.



After I got home I put two and two together. On the left side of that photo is my main ladder. That spot happens to be fairly, as far as faces in the pit go. I did notice a bunch of large nails on that face too.

Towards the end of the day, while I was sitting on the edge, I looked down and noticed a remnant of a wooden stake about a foot down off the ledge. I pulled it out and a nail came out with it. It was thoroughly rotted. My guess is that where I have my ladder, the old miners had theirs as well.

The conditions around the mine, i.e. very rusted steel and no lumber remnants along with the old can I found out there, make me believe this hole is over a century old and possibly closer to 120 years old.

Arizona gets sand storms "haboobs" as they are officially known in the meteorology world. Dan and I think, because there is no clumping of the dirt, that almost all of the dirt in that pit is windblown. The topography bears that out as well. I took a course in college on hydrology and I can say that the hill doesn't drain much water into that pit. Supporting that theory is that there is very little edge water effects where drainage has cut into the dirt around the collar of the pit. In the video from a week back you can see some water channeling, but it is minor compared to what we've seen on other pits in the area.

Our task then is to dig and haul out 100-120 years worth of silt and windblown sand so we can get, well, to the bottom of it. I'm going to build a frame out of 2x12's about 14' long so we can haul the buckets out of there without them getting hung up on the sides of the pit. Basically it'll look like one of my ladders with metal flashing on it so the buckets will have a chute we can haul them up. I'm not going to build much else as far as structures on the thing until we get down to the bottom and also check out some of the other veins on that hill.

 

[SaltwaterServr]

Little mining update

I missed last weekend due to a head cold that lasted a week. Two trips to the doctor. Fever actually broke right after the Cowboys game so that's a plus.

Here's a little video showing some of the very interesting surface geology right to the north of my mine.



Really all I've been doing lately is digging out the overburden from inside the pit. I had to move quite a bit of rock out to get to the dirt. Overburden is anything dirt, rock, vegetation, that is in the way of getting to the ore itself.

I've mentioned about arsenopyrite having a very distinct garlic smell. Two weeks ago I got about 3' down and the smell of the arsenic was very strong. I also did a little hiking behind my mine and found this...



Also stumbled across another very hidden little dig with some good sulfur indications of gold. Probably not going to mess with it, too much of a pain to get to.



Another photo on the same dig.



Back to the pit. This is where I finished two weeks ago. Not a very big hole, but making progress.



This is about 1/3 of the way into today's digging. The garlic smell was overpowering. I had to get out of the pit itself twice to let it air out. I'm going to be on the lookout for any signs of arsenic poisoning in the next couple of days.



And where I ended up. That's 26 five gallon buckets worth of rock and dirt hauled out of there today. Opposite end from the buckets is chest deep on me.



So what's next? Well, the hole needs to be opened up wider since I'm not keen on the sides collapsing. The dirt seems very stable, but it is very loose packed.

Next weekend I'm going to get back down in there and see if I can't get another 2' deeper or so. If the smell gets nasty again, I'll hop out and work the surface around the hole since I'll need to get that down anyway.

I was talking with my mining partner tonight. We know how big our tailings pile is. It won't fill the pit. We know that a lot of the rock in the tailings pile looks nothing like the interior of the pit. Not even remotely. The tailings pile looks like grey granite almost, or basalt. So where the heck did it come from?

Our big unknown is that we haven't a clue how much ore was hauled away from the pit for processing. Was it few cubic yards? A dozen? 10 dozen? Anybody's guess is just as valid as the next. The only thing we have to go on is that there are 3 other small mines nearby, the 231, 232, and 233. All three of those mines have very small tailings piles for the volume of rock pulled out of there. Does that same trend hole for our pit?

My theory for now is that the pit is a LOT deeper than we think. I honestly expected to hit the bottom in 3' or less. I'm expecting to have to get down 6-8' to hit the bottom of the ore body. There is a very remote chance that we'll run into some underground workings, like a small adit that has been backfilled. There's no wood at all in the dirt in the pit so if we start to hit any timbering, we'll have an indication of something going on.

Oh, dinner tonight. Ham steak over the fire. A little chilly out there, but it was tasty vittles.

 

[SaltwaterServr]

Dirt...You got to move it move it...move it!

Sore and tired today after digging yesterday.

I have a hand auger I built using this flighting from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Hiltex-10245-Auger-Bits-Heavy/dp/B00HHIRM2M/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1480887025&sr=8-2&keywords=4%22+auger

I put a piece of black pipe on it and made a T handle out of the same pipe. I can get down about 4' with it. I have another piece of 5' long pipe that I can go deeper with, but I've never found a hole that needed it.

I decided to take a shot and finding how deep the overburden goes by drilling down into the spot in this photo where the buckets are sitting.



I got all the way down to the top of the flighting, and hit a rock. I couldn't get past it so I thought that might be the actual vein.

So I put the auger up and started digging.

And digging.

38 five gallon buckets of dirt later, I'm 6" below where the auger hit "bottom".

From this photo:



To where I am now is about 7-8 feet deep I guess.

The sulfur smell wasn't nearly as strong as last week, but I still brought along a pretty good respirator designed for solvent and paint fumes. I didn't wear it this time around.

The hole got deep enough that I had to cut footholds into the side of the dirt to get out. I have the 10' ladder handy, but once you put it in the hole it's really just in the way.

Where I finished yesterday:



This next photo is interesting for a few things. First, the rock sticking out of the side of the hole from the right side partially blocking the bucket is my first "step" to get out of the pit. There's another on the left side, then you can see the next one on the right directly above the rock.

Now, take a look at the dark patch just right of center at the top of the photo. That's the red oxidized portion of the vein. You can see the red/black ore in the undug pit photo a few photos up.

Off the right upper edge of the buckets you can see that light grey rock. That's the unoxidized portion of the vein that's been underground for who knows how long. I cut a piece of that out and forgot to bring it home. It's got malachite in it.



Next up...more digging. The hole is too deep to shovel it into buckets on the surface. The last 4 buckets or so I was scooping with one bucket and pouring it into buckets on the surface. Even that isn't going to work, the hole is too deep.

The hole isn't wide enough to put a bucket down there and shovel into it. What I'm going to do is lie the ladder across the hole and suspend a bucket from hit. I'll fill that up, haul it out by a rope, and then put another bucket in its place. It should go pretty quick.

Once I hit bottom, I'm going to start expanding the hole to the top left (northeast). There are surface indications of additional mineralization that I want to work towards underground.

Until next time...

 

[Mad Machinist]

Next time I get down that way, I'll let you know. I have something I want to show you. Little secret an old timer taught me.

 

[Jeff95531]

What you are doing frankly scares the bejeezus outta me but you seem to know what you are doing so...