LOSING YOUR GOLD

[Fullpan]

Bnuggets recent post about losing his snuffer bottle, got me to thinking of the different ways I've lost gold over the years. If you have a story, chime in...

1. Sutro was a Siberian Husky who belonged to a partner. He wasn't very disciplined, but he had a great personality, and everyone loved him. He would spend time trying to snatch the oversize cobbles tumbling through the dredge box. As long as he didn't climb up on the pontoons, no harm done. We found a mini bonanza on bedrock one week, 1/2 oz per day and would do 1st clean-up panning right next to the dredge every afternoon. Well Sutro came barging up and pounced on the pan just as I was reaching for the snuffer bottle. You guessed it, the pan flipped and nearly half oz fell in amongst the streamside boulders. Spent the next day dredging the area, but didn't re-capture all - "Sutro, Bad Dog"

2. Already posted the 2 dwt nugget and gold chain story - went hiking from camp, came back without 300 dollars of bling, lol.

3. Final clean-ups at the house - what can go wrong, will go wrong, when you're new - probably 2 grams in carpeting...

4. 1st Motherlode nugget - been prospecting about a month - total newbie - a 2 gram nugget showed up in the pan "eureka, I'm
rich, quit the day job, etc". I couldn't stop looking at it. Took it into the sleeping bag that night, kept holding it in up and shining flashlight on it - oops dropped it, trashed the bedding etc. - never found it, damn..

5. Glass vials - use plastic vials !

Lets hear some more...

 

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[ProspectorALEX]

Once while i was running my mini sluice a bucket full of dirt got away. We recovered the bucket but the dirt got dumped out. We would joke that we were just trying to help replenish the gold supply. Lol

Alex

 

[MinerFortyNiner1952]

Not sure if this counts Fullpan but we were on the other end of someone losing gold in that we found gold in a manner where you wouldn't think gold
would accumulate.

It was our first day on our claim, trying to figure out boundaries and paths and managed to stumble / fall our way down the hill to a small feeder creek
to our creek, but still on our claim. It was the most improbable place and my buddy looks down and says "Gold." Sure enough, there was a small pocket
of loose pieces just sitting there in about 6" of water. And every piece was covered with mercury, so it seemed probable that
these little nuggies crossed someone's slick plate and got covered in mercury. Somehow, they lost their golden treasure, only to be discovered by a
bunch of newbies now thinking that this was gonna be so easy. . .

 

[H&F909ORO]

Ha loosing gold what a terrible story for the ones telling it. Well for me I did the worst mistake possible in sluicing history. Dumb me wasn't getting any gold from my EZ sluice so I decided to tip it to a 75 degree angle. I fed a lot of material through it and got a few specks, but just think how much fine gold I lost! Never again. Another story is when I was trying to figure how I should clean out my new angus mackirk sluice. I knew how but wasn't sure how it would go, so I tipped it back and the water moved it from my hand. I grabbed it and I'm sure I lost some gold. I did still find some in that clean out though. Bad times.

 

[ALewis]

One of my very first trips out, I took my son & my homemade riffle "sluice" (ugly thing, used rubber mat, carpet & "L" brackets for the riffles) to Yankee Jim's.

I was classifying down to about an inch or so....Kinda thinking there might have been a little gold loss there, considerin the golf ball size rocks in the sluice

The real loss came when my son jumped / cannonballed in front of the sluice, washed it out clean.

 

[DDancer]

So I'm in the middle of a creek on a small bar of cobble with two pans a grader and shovel digging a lovely hole with nice pickers coming out. My big pan and grader is my ruff pan~ go to black sands, swirl and check out the goodies and dump it into my concentration pan. I keep the snuffer bottle on the bank with lunch~ I'm still waiting for the last one I lost to come back.... Any rate I decide to shift a big rock outta the way and get splashed in the process. Well my back was to my pans and when I came around to dump my shovel it was a sad sight to see only one pan on the cobbles..... my concentrate pan had set sail and redistributed a half days work down stream somewhere. Pans float good now I anchor them with a heavy cobble.

 

[gold tramp]

Before i got a table for the mill tails i Had a 12 foot tail race at the end of our mill it would grab the last of the stuff that got blown out of the wheel, would clean about once a month it was good for a small bead cleanup.
Im sittin in the trailer look out and see my partner and a hose washing the end of the mill off, he didnt care for the splashed around muck builtup on the finishing equip, long story short, the flood of water from the wash job blew who knows how much gold out the end, we had been running that course School teacher gold for a while, he was never allowed at the finishing end of the mill alone again.
GT.................

 

[huntsman53]

I typically do not recover any Gold I find in the field and sometimes take some time to do so, even after getting home. This means that I classify, pan the classified material down to see if there is any Gold, then dump what is in the pan into a bucket to be run later. I have a fairly large home but there is no real storage space, so my' Gold prospecting equipment and classified/panned down material are usually kept in the upper garage. Well, my oldest daughter has a bad habit of periodically cleaning and organizing all of my' stuff in the garage and on several occasions, she has dumped the contents of my' Gold concentrates buckets in the yard. I guess that you can say, that if I ever want to find Gold, then I know right where to look.


Frank

 

[socalocmatt]

Spent a few hours running material. Did a quick pan on the cons and grabbed the color that I saw. Put the AU in a small plastic container. Kept the rest of the cons to run later at home. Got home and unpacked. Had an "Oh S*!t" moment when I realize that I forgot the plastic container on a bolder next to my bag.

 

[goldog]

Way back when I 1st started I caught a ride done the hill with someone I had just met. I settled in and and tossed my vial on the dashboard. The guys looks over and says "you didn't put your vial on the dash did you? Sorry but there is no dashboard, its just covered in upholstery." I looked and my gold went straight to the street.

 

[H&F909ORO]

Way back when I 1st started I caught a ride done the hill with someone I had just met. I settled in and and tossed my vial on the dashboard. The guys looks over and says "you didn't put your vial on the dash did you? Sorry but there is no dashboard, its just covered in upholstery." I looked and my gold went straight to the street.

Damn that's one heck of a loss. How much did you lose?

 

[H&F909ORO]

Once while i was running my mini sluice a bucket full of dirt got away. We recovered the bucket but the dirt got dumped out. We would joke that we were just trying to help replenish the gold supply. Lol Alex

As a wise man once told me, "the river doesn't want your gold"

 

[goldog]

Maybe a couple of dwt (+/- 3 grams for you metric users) Gold was cheap back then. I gotta get back up there.

 

[dave wiseman]

Back around 1979 I was snorkling (fanning) for gold in Angels creek and had about half a dwt and a trade token in my plastic pill bottle and it floated away in the current.Searched for an hour but couldn't find it.Two years later I was downstream and found the pill vial covered in mossy slime under some tree roots....another true story was I was walking in town when the old mayor of our little city of Angels Camp,Ca. passed by and asked to see my gold.Being a little in the bag he dropped the small glass vial on the sidewalk and said don't worry about it kid.Two weeks later he he gives me a bottle with about three dwts in it.

 

[EriktheProspector]

Lost my vial, She found a snuffer!

2 stories, one about losing, one about finding.

When I first started prospecting I had all my accumulated gold in one glass vial. Well, it got out of my pocket and floated into 20+ft deep of boulders. It was under a gram probably, but might as well have been an ounce to me at the time. It was not retrievable.. Over the years I've seen pickers wash out of my pan, flat ones, while panning. I've numerous times knocked over concentrates into the river.
There's always a gold loss %, whether it be from panning technique or clumsiness or whatever..


My girlfriend and I were out prospecting, hiking far along the river. She had never found gold, and didn't have the fever.. when all the sudden she says to me from behind, "You want one of these?". I look back at her and she's pointing to a snuffer bottle at her feet.. I look at her and say, "Are you kidding me? That's yours babe. You found it. Please pick it up now. Oh my god." When she picked it up I noticed in the light there was substantial black sand in the bottle.. I immediately got out my gold pan and poured it into my pan.. Oh my gosh. This was a truly gorgeous, shimmering pan, full of all types of gold and perhaps a couple of grams. We couldn't help but smile and a bit of gold fever may have started within her that day. I couldn't stop talking about how lucky she was to find that, and how hard the prospector worked who had lost it. On that 4 day trip I taught her to pan, and really insisted she try and get gold to see how hard it was for that sad prospector to get that gold. She tried but was never able to find gold that trip - other than the amazing snuffer bottle find that is.
She has it in a glass vial now as a souvenir for all her time alongside me in the goldfields. She is very appreciative of it, and can now understand the miner's loss.

After that experience I started looking along stream banks for high water lines where there's lots of shrubs where snuffer bottles can get trapped. Also look for any bottle that may have black sand in it. As we can see, we're losing gold as much as we find it at times!

It is an experience like this one, finding a snuffer with gold, that the phrase, "gold is where you find it" is yet again brought to light. Yes, indeed. Gold is where you find it!

Yellow pans to ya'!

 

[TAKODA]

Damn Fullpan ................ I'd bet good money I would have found that damn 2 gram piece
or they would have found my bones .

I don't think I could have let that go . It would haunt me .