OH NO!!! I don't want anybody to start thinking I know what I'm talking about... My Dad is the one who is doing a lot of the research, its a team effort... He's back on the East Coast now,
and he has GOLD FEVER!!! and he's got it bad.... This gold thing is something he wanted to do for years and years and years... Last fall, after years of bugging me, he convinced me to go
out in my driveway and pan some of that black sand..... Now I have the fever....
He came out here this spring for 2 months.... And we thought it was going to be "dig in the arroyo"... And that is where we started... And the old man started asking questions, and reading
up more and more on the area, and when we were out at our claim (that's a whole other story, over in the journal section
http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/prospectors-journals/447759-beware-new-mexico-gold-claim-ebay-allsgolden-goldseekr77.html
we were looking around, and we started asking questions, we had both done a lot of research at that point, but it started to come together a little more....
And then it just snowballed.....
He gets up in the morning... Gets the coffee going, and instead of catching up on the news, or reading facebook, he does research... He stares at the map of our claim, always trying to find
new satelite images... He searches for a kind of rock he just found out about yesterday, or a new term he found in a report... And he keeps coming up with more and more stuff... Yesterday he
came up with the curriculum and expectations for students at the school of mines (the one up in Socorro) for the 1902-1903 school year. Then he came up with some report from 1927, how
much all the people working at one of the mines made, and how much it cost to buy a Model T and gas for a year... I haven't read it all, I haven't had time...
It hasn't all come together, but its getting closer... I've got quite the collection of rocks from our claim... Crushed one a few weeks ago, just a fist size piece I hammered off... 18 colors.. All plus 120....
And then here's the kicker.. Crushed the rest of the rock, and another from the same place... NOTHING... I ran it through the cube.. Turns out when you crush those rocks, the dust is dry clay...
Wet process it, and the gold gets locked up in a wad of clay, and goes through... Classify(dry) out the tiny stuff, -120, and the gold shows up really easy...
Its not in the quartz, at least not the big pieces we find... But where we are at, there were apparently 2 eruptions, one about 70 million years ago, and one about 30 million years ago,
which was a "slow flow" eruption... So on our claim, we are dealing with 2 different things, where as a mile or 2 north, you are only dealing with the eruption that happened 70 million
years ago... Then at my house, 70 miles away, and I have gold in my yard... Completely different.. The gold is in completely different rocks, those mountains are only 12-15 million years old...
I didn't mean to babble on... I think its kind of fun and interesting... Actually I think its a LOT of fun and VERY interesting... Trying to learn the geology of the area, and the history of the
area, and then going out and putting it to work has been a blast.. 8 months ago, I just wanted to get gold.. And now its become an obsession and an adventure, and learning something
new sitting at home is almost as exciting as finding some shiny stuff.
I've got a thread over in the Journal section where I plan to document this stuff... The work thing has just been crazy... I've had buckets of dirt in the back of my truck, not processed, for
a few weeks now.
A small example of something found in some report... Makes me lick my chops.
Best of luck to all of you as the waters lower and the weather gets better!
Bring it on! Wish I was up in the Mother Load today in the 103 degree Sunshine... but I'll be up there somewhere tomorrow in triple digit heat if I can figure out where to go. 
