Placer Claim Mined Out?

[desertgolddigger]

I belong to a local club that owns a claim. This club has had this claim for many years, and acquired it after the old timers had mined it previously, and others after they commercial outfits closed up.
I walked quite a bit of the 160 acre claim, and noted that just about every wash had been worked. Most of the surface nuggets has also been detected by those with gold detectors. In other words, this place has been picked over and over and over.
But I m a stubborn type of person, and I figured, just watching how people ram their puffer and blower drywashers, that some gold was just being blown through them. maybe not much, but some small stuff that never got a chance to settle behind the riffles.
I know many of you would never go to the effort of digging for three to four hours through the tailings in these washes. Again, I'm a bit stubborn, and anyway, I just wanted to have some fun locally, instead of driving 300 miles roundtrip to something that gives a little more for less effort.
I've spent the last three weeks, digging a few times a week along about 30 yards of wash, and have recovered just about a gram of gold. That might not seem like much, but I have only dug up 5 grams, not counting this one gram in almost 20 years out here drywashing in the desert of southern California.
As you would know, things always seem to go wrong. My gas powered blower motor decided it was time for the repair shop, and haven't heard from the shop in two weeks. So I purchased a WORX WG521 corded electric leaf blower to use with my Royal Large drywasher. I'm using a portable generator to provide the power. And it actually is working better than with my old gas powered blower. I have to run the blower on the lowest speed, or I just blow everything through the riffles. Results are very good, as I am getting gold specks so small that I will have to use the Blue bowl in order to recover them.
I'm not only getting a little gold, I'm having some fun, and I am getting a good workout. I've lost 10 pounds since I started. So things are going well.
I'm still digging test holes around the old time hard rock mines in the hope I will find where the gold has drifted downhill below these mines. So far just a couple specks here and there. I figure I just have to move laterally one way or the other before I get something better Of course, I' don't really know if the old timers stripped the hillsides. Even if they have, they apparently aren't as thorough as I am. I hope that I may be lucky and find a larger piece of gold that the old timers, previous placer miners, and detectorists have missed.
Hope everyone is having as much fun as I have been having.

 

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[desertgolddigger]

I was out at the Pit this morning, chopping away. Won't be chopping away anymore, as I ran out of the vein, and associated rock. All that's left is the gray rock on one side, and fractured rock on the other, and a solid wall of gray rock ahead.

Guess I'll be back to placer mining. I stopped by the club claim to determine a location to try. It's farther down the wash, but the sides are lower, and it seems no one has checked opposite the hillside to see if gold might have washed over there. Will try Friday to see if anything is there, and will keep adjusting until I find something. the lower side is also the inside of the bend, so I'm hopeful.

 

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[desertgolddigger]

I'm slowly working on how to cut the time involved i n processing my milled ore. I've been sluicing it, then removi ng the magnetics by drying it, then using a strong magnet. That is very time consuming.

I have a mini cleanup sluice I originally used to process my milled ore. Now it will be used strictly as a magnetic trap for the big sluices concentrates. I'll save the magnetics, as I figure it'll have some super fine gold trapped in it, but most of the non magnetic material will go through the mini magnetic trap sluice to the catch bucket for panning.

Hopefully this will save me an hour or so. I already am saving about an hour on my big sluice. I ditched the shaker bottle, and went back to the 2 1/2 gallon bucket where I put five cups of milled material in, add water, stir with a stick vigorously, and then pour into my big sluice. So far I've not found any gold getting through the sluice using this method. Takes me slightly less than an hour to make three runs of 25 cups per run..

I've added an improvement to my Shelter Logic shelter. I now have repurposed an old tornado house fan. I tested it at noon, and it kept me cool while I sat inside the shelter between adding scoops to my mill, and running the electric classifier. Running the electric classifier at the same time I'm milling has saved me about another hour.

So, instead of taking almost all day, it's about half a day for running a 5 gallon bucket of milled material.

 

[desertgolddigger]

Another update. This time on the Cement Mixer Ball Mill. I got the 1 and 1 1/4 inch diameter steel balls at noon today. I added the 1/2 inch steel balls and then put in about 1/4 of a 5 gallon bucker and water. It's been running since 1 this afternoon, and I'll turn things off at 6 PM to see what happened.

I just looked ate the mess, and it looks like brown soup. Had to add water, as it seems it evaporates fairly quickly with the open mouth cement mixer.

Will dump the whole mess through a 1/2 inch classifier screen, and drench that with clean water to clean the steel balls. Then I'll sluice, and see what happened, and if it's worth the time and effort to ball mill the stuff the chain mill cannot pulverize.

Will edit this post with the results.

EDITED: What a sticky, muddy mess!! But it's done, and the results are not very good. I had about 10 specks visible with a 5X loupe, and a very spotty line of stuff I could see at 10X. But apparently there was some invisible gold that the mercury picked up, as the little mercury ball did increase in size after slurping up the visible gold in the pan corner. Either that, or like Reed said, it picked up non-ferrous metal.

I can now understand why a company would purchase a huge ball mill that can run several tons of material at a time. They'd end up with a few more grams of gold. My efforts of about 15 pounds of material didn't hardly get anything. But as I've said, I didn't get skunked.

 

[desertgolddigger]

I used my mini cleanup sluice this morning. There's no rubber matting in it. I used a scrap strip of plexiglass, five 3 inch long rare earth magnets using duct tape to hold them to the plexiglass. I went into my sewing stash and found elastics to hold the plexiglass to the bottom of the rain gutter sluice.

I added material, and when the magnetic riffles got fat with black sand, all I had to do was put the sluice end in a bucket, and pull own on the plexiglass to release the black sand into the bucket. The other material had gone into a small container when sluicing the magnetics.

What was basically left was black sands that didn't stick to the magnets, and the sands/gold.

The setup was easy to use, and very quick ridding the concentrates of the magnetics, though some lighter material did get caught up in the magnetic riffles.

What took me an hour to remove the magnetis by hand, took five minutes with the magnetic riffle sluice..

 

[southfork]

Placers are a type of mineral deposit in which grains of a valuable mineral like gold or the rare earths are mixed with sand deposited by a river or glacier. Placer is also a mining method term. Placer mining uses water and gravity to separate gold from surrounding material.

desertgolddigger knows what placers are you might want to start your own thread welcome anyways.

 

[N-Lionberger]

The magnetic sand build up around the magnets itself acts as riffle. There’s a chance your magnetic sand still has gold in it. Check out Clean Gold sluices, they use magnetic sign material to make v ribs out of magnetic sands which catch fine gold.

 

[desertgolddigger]

The magnetic sand build up around the magnets itself acts as riffle. There’s a chance your magnetic sand still has gold in it. Check out Clean Gold sluices, they use magnetic sign material to make v ribs out of magnetic sands which catch fine gold.

Like I said, there was material besides the black sand, and that I'll be saving this material for later processing.

 

[desertgolddigger]

Gents, I finally have come up with what happened with my cement mixer ball mill experiment.

This past Sunday I ran all my material that was milled, and was larger than 80 mesh through my drywasher.

After panning, and getting a nice gathering of larger gold, I decided to hold onto the material that my drywasher riffles held. All of this material was a darker color, either a brown or darker color.

I threw this material in the mixer, along with a fifth of a 5 gallon bucket of larger than 80 mesh material from my chain mill. This additional material hadn't been run through the drywasher.

I'm guessing that the darker material from my drywasher is what contained the gold.

From this point on, I'll accumulate the darker material from my drywashing for cement mixer ball milling. I'm not going to waste time processing anything larger than 80 mesh that hasn't been run through the drywasher. It's a waste of time, and probably would end up wearing out my cement mixer.

Also, I'm guessing I don't need to run the ball mill longer than two hours. It was like a sludgy soup at three hours.

 

[JohnWhite]

I came across a YouTube video you might want to check out…



I believe it is best if you use a mix of different sized balls…But what do I know

Ed T

 

[PayStreak]

I'm slowly working on how to cut the time involved i n processing my milled ore. I've been sluicing it, then removi ng the magnetics by drying it, then using a strong magnet. That is very time consuming.

I have a mini cleanup sluice I originally used to process my milled ore. Now it will be used strictly as a magnetic trap for the big sluices concentrates. I'll save the magnetics, as I figure it'll have some super fine gold trapped in it, but most of the non magnetic material will go through the mini magnetic trap sluice to the catch bucket for panning.

Hopefully this will save me an hour or so. I already am saving about an hour on my big sluice. I ditched the shaker bottle, and went back to the 2 1/2 gallon bucket where I put five cups of milled material in, add water, stir with a stick vigorously, and then pour into my big sluice. So far I've not found any gold getting through the sluice using this method. Takes me slightly less than an hour to make three runs of 25 cups per run..

I've added an improvement to my Shelter Logic shelter. I now have repurposed an old tornado house fan. I tested it at noon, and it kept me cool while I sat inside the shelter between adding scoops to my mill, and running the electric classifier. Running the electric classifier at the same time I'm milling has saved me about another hour.

So, instead of taking almost all day, it's about half a day for running a 5 gallon bucket of milled material.

 

[PayStreak]

I was out at the Pit this morning, chopping away. Won't be chopping away anymore, as I ran out of the vein, and associated rock. All that's left is the gray rock on one side, and fractured rock on the other, and a solid wall of gray rock ahead.

Guess I'll be back to placer mining. I stopped by the club claim to determine a location to try. It's farther down the wash, but the sides are lower, and it seems no one has checked opposite the hillside to see if gold might have washed over there. Will try Friday to see if anything is there, and will keep adjusting until I find something. the lower side is also the inside of the bend, so I'm hopeful.

I hope you find something there, I have found just shy of a 1/4 oz of placer that was in an overlooked spot in the river that has been heavily worked. That was something and unfortunateIy I was not able to go back to the same spot until after Winter and I could hardly find a few specs in the area that showed decent gold the Summer the year before . I know the Winter rains moved the streak somewhere else.

 

[russau]

John I enjoyed your video and your sluice set up BUT I think your running your bilge pump to fast ! I think you need to slow it down a little BECAUSE you showed a small piece of gold in your trowel from the end of your sluice tailings. your mat did a good job capturing fine gold and I liked it !

 

[desertgolddigger]

I came across a YouTube video you might want to check out…



I believe it is best if you use a mix of different sized balls…But what do I know

Ed T

Based on my one and only experience with a mixer ball mill, yes, several sizes are probably more efficient at grinding your ore. Actual ball sized depends on the size of ore rocks you want to mill. I'm using 5 pounds of 1/2 inch, and 20 pounds of 1 and 1.5 inch steel balls. I figure the surfaces of the different sizes will cover more area for grinding the material down.

Based on what I did, two hour run time is about right for an equal amount of material to grind, and about the same amount of water. But like yourself, I'm only guessing.

 

[desertgolddigger]

I hope you find something there, I have found just shy of a 1/4 oz of placer that was in an overlooked spot in the river that has been heavily worked. That was something and unfortunateIy I was not able to go back to the same spot until after Winter and I could hardly find a few specs in the area that showed decent gold the Summer the year before . I know the Winter rains moved the streak somewhere else.

Was at the club claim at Humbug mountain digging 10 full 5 gallon buckets of classified 1/4 inch material. That spot was a near fizzle. Got about 25 specks between 50 and 80 mesh. So not a skunk, but I will move up the wash 30 feet, and repeat the same amount of material, and keep hopping up the wash until I get better gold.

 

[PayStreak]

Was at the club claim at Humbug mountain digging 10 full 5 gallon buckets of classified 1/4 inch material. That spot was a near fizzle. Got about 25 specks between 50 and 80 mesh. So not a skunk, but I will move up the wash 30 feet, and repeat the same amount of material, and keep hopping up the wash until I get better gold.

Sounds like plan, is that area quartz pocket gold country ? Hope you hit some nice gold.

 

[desertgolddigger]

Sounds like plan, is that area quartz pocket gold country ? Hope you hit some nice gold.

Yes, Humbug is mainly quartz, but there are several mines on the claim that are highly mineralized types. All have been worked over and over, until almost nothing containing gold exists.

The placers have also been worked to death for nearly 100 years, but the area has so may mines and tiny prospects scattered around the claim, the hillsides are probably covered with some gold. I figure this is the case, as after we get torrential monsoonal rains, the upper portion of the wash I'm working will have additional fine gold washed into it.

Trying to mine placer gold on the hillsides isn't something you do. As I said, the gold generally is very fine, and from test holes I've dug, very scattered.

I've basically been working the drywasher tailing piles in the bottom of the wash. From what I gather, one of our members quickly worked this wash by digging, and just throwing the paydirt on the drywasher grizzly. In the process, some of the gold never made it into the hopper, and apparently the drywasher also was worked very quickly, with some gold never settling behind the riffles, but just flowing over them. Most of this gold is of the fine, wire, and flat variety, and that is what I've been getting, with the occasional (very rare) pickers up to 1/4 gram, but generally about the size of 1/16 to 1/8 inch (what I call baby pickers and slightly more common, but still rare)

There you have what our one wash looks like. Other washes have also been worked to death, and you're lucky to get flour gold. If you do, it's only 10-20 specks in 10 full 5 gallon buckets classified to 1/4 inch, with rare pieces maybe to 1/16 inch.

There's gold, pockets, but finding them is very time consuming. My 28 grams from the claim have come from the drywasher tailings.

 

[PayStreak]

Yes, Humbug is mainly quartz, but there are several mines on the claim that are highly mineralized types. All have been worked over and over, until almost nothing containing gold exists.

The placers have also been worked to death for nearly 100 years, but the area has so may mines and tiny prospects scattered around the claim, the hillsides are probably covered with some gold. I figure this is the case, as after we get torrential monsoonal rains, the upper portion of the wash I'm working will have additional fine gold washed into it.

Trying to mine placer gold on the hillsides isn't something you do. As I said, the gold generally is very fine, and from test holes I've dug, very scattered.

I've basically been working the drywasher tailing piles in the bottom of the wash. From what I gather, one of our members quickly worked this wash by digging, and just throwing the paydirt on the drywasher grizzly. In the process, some of the gold never made it into the hopper, and apparently the drywasher also was worked very quickly, with some gold never settling behind the riffles, but just flowing over them. Most of this gold is of the fine, wire, and flat variety, and that is what I've been getting, with the occasional (very rare) pickers up to 1/4 gram, but generally about the size of 1/16 to 1/8 inch (what I call baby pickers and slightly more common, but still rare)

There you have what our one wash looks like. Other washes have also been worked to death, and you're lucky to get flour gold. If you do, it's only 10-20 specks in 10 full 5 gallon buckets classified to 1/4 inch, with rare pieces maybe to 1/16 inch.

There's gold, pockets, but finding them is very time consuming. My 28 grams from the claim have come from the drywasher tailings.

I have worked tailings piles and found nice gold in them, but they are from ancient river gravels from high up in benches away from the current stream. These are from hydraulic mines that have the tailings dumped near the present stream and the ancient gravels are still in place above the stream, but it is tricky to pinpoint the rich paystreaks in them and so the old miners moved volumes of dirt to get the gold they found and their gold clean ups were measured in pounds not ounces. I like to get down below the tailings and find the bedrock they are sitting on and work that bedrock and at times it pays in pickers and small nuggets and at times larger nuggets. I have not tried desert gold mining and sounds somewhat different, but the goal is to find the gold.

 

[PayStreak]

I have worked tailings piles and found nice gold in them, but they are from ancient river gravels from high up in benches away from the current stream. These are from hydraulic mines that have the tailings dumped near the present stream and the ancient gravels are still in place above the stream, but it is tricky to pinpoint the rich paystreaks in them and so the old miners moved volumes of dirt to get the gold they found and their gold clean ups were measured in pounds not ounces. I like to get down below the tailings and find the bedrock they are sitting on and work that bedrock and at times it pays in pickers and small nuggets and at times larger nuggets. I have not tried desert gold mining and sounds somewhat different, but the goal is to find the gold.

I wanted to mention that this area I work in is quartz vein pocket country as well and some fabulous finds have been made. Like you said finding the pocket itself takes time, patience and work but if you find one of em O'Boy !

 

[desertgolddigger]

I went out Monday, but decided to go dig in the old drywasher tailing pile. I seem to get tired quicker, so I only managed sever 5 gallon buckets of classified material to 1/4 inch. All the other stuff (rocks) got either thrown up on the hillside bank, or was deposited on the access roads.

While I didn't get a lot of gold quantity wise, weight wise I got .17 grams. That's my best take in three to four months.

I was going to try this morning, but two bad feet are keeping me home. I did volunteer work up at the local observatory, and somehow bruised my right heel. I already have problems with the left that is developing hammer toe. Hopefully I can try the Friday.

So, all I'm managing is breaking ore with a sledge hammer, then taking that to chain mill. The next morning I run the milled ore. I just did a five gallon bucket, and hope I get my normal thin line of the super fine dust gold. I always hope for something significant I can post a picture on, but that's rare with the type of gold I'm getting.

EDITED: This mornings gold take was much the same as usual. All the gold was that super ultra fine stuff, and once I tapped it all together, the line was a fat (1/8 inch wide) one inch long one. I reprocessed my sluice tailings, and got about a fifth of this mornings main run. So, not too bad a day, as the mercury ball is starting to show a speckled surface. Hopefully by Sunday that ball will be full and I can add that to my six gram glob.

 

[N-Lionberger]

Like I said, there was material besides the black sand, and that I'll be saving this material for later processing.

What I’m suggesting is that there is a possibility after your magnetic strip accumulates enough black sand the magnetic matrix acts as a riffle and you may be losing fine gold in that spot.