I love the color and mineralization in your ore Takoda. Dusted, your ore is similar to the stuff around a old hard rock mine on a club up in the Motherload, minus the gold, Groveland mining district. However most of the this type of ore is pile up in discard piley s, and a lot of the better ore was pushed by the FS into a 1000 foot vertical shaft. We have been processing some crushed material piled at the bottom of a arastra.
Pic 1 is the pile of crushed sulfides, tons of pyrite
Pic 2 is the arastra
Pic 3 is the shaft
Pic 4 is the discarded rock
We are going back for a another 3 day dig on the long holday weekend and hope for better results than our last 3 day trip. Only a little over 3 1/2 grxms for a ton of dirt moved, and plenty of gold coming out the end our box and end to a angus we had to check our tailings. Mine water to run our box has a heavy sulfur smell. I am hoping to try your ladder sluice to run behind our box to hopefully get these coarse peices to fall out. It is always great to log on and see the great pictures of yellow that you Takoda, Goldtramp and Dave Wiseman coax out of the rock...
Pic 5 is the best piece to come out of the hill so far. I thought it was blue quartz, but I am guessing the blue is sulfides? Pic 6 is of our box on our last trip. Pic 7, if you look past my big dumb ass, you can see a distinct split in the material. To the left the blueish tailings, and to the right the more yellowish material.... PS my son the human digger on the left, and Mark my mining partner on the right. We didn't find the big gold, but we have a great time
1000's of pot chards, knapping flakes and Spanish Terracotta too! the spanish terracotta we can date to Coronado IE (Francisco Vázquez de Coronado y Luján (1510 – 22 September 1554) was a Spanish conquistador, who visited New Mexico and other parts of what are now the southwestern United States between 1540 and 1542. Coronado had hoped to conquer the mythical Seven Cities of Gold. His name is often Anglicized as Vasquez de Coronado. Sometimes the name even appears in a Spanish-English hybridization of Vásquez de Coronado) due to the Coronado state monument and the pueblo of Santa Anna being near by. great fun!
