Last Post 01 Dec 2016 01:14 PM by  tom glenn
Fire Gold!
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tom glenn
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01 Dec 2016 10:39 AM

    We spent the summer prospecting a portion of our claims that most would just walk over the top of and not look back. It was heavily mined by the Chinese with long rows of stacked rocks and my wife has found a bucket full of square nails along with  a hand pounded rusty gold pan, forged ax head among other things. But the most interesting thing we found was an array of small nuggets all in one small sample bucket containing  gold, silver, platinum and copper in different shapes and forms. the peculiar thing was that the backs of all the pieces were completely flat like a table with very little indent on them. The area has been burned twice in a ten year period and was so hot it burnt 3 foot holes in the ground where stumps used to be. I can tell you that the Chinese left very little in the tailings piles because I have screened down to 100 mesh and run over a rp4 table with only low results but when you take the 1/4" minus and grind it up the micron gold is quite high in content so does anyone else think these nuggets could have been formed by the fire.

     Thanks Tom Glenn 

    Leo Lorenz
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    01 Dec 2016 12:23 PM
    Tom....its interesting that you said that about the fire and gold. I am firmly of the belief and I do not see this point raised much at all. My thoughts have always been that those gold nuggets that we see coming from California mostly......were formed by the continually burning of the forests that go on out there. Over the years small microscopic gold melts easily and mixes with other gold and it continually grows in size absorbing any adjacent gold it might be sitting by. The carbon produced by the fire provides a perfect medium to adsorb the gold or provide a flux mix to enable the gold to join with other gold. It is a well know fact that carbon is used in extracting gold from heap leaching solutions. Gold actually adheres to the surface of carbon. I think the continued heating by fire of the ground, over the years, condensed the gold into the nuggets we see. So many of them look like they were from a "melt". Meanwhile other gold like small flakes and and such was derived from the decay and erosion of quartz veins. I wish there was more discussion about these possibilities
    tom glenn
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    01 Dec 2016 01:14 PM

    this ground has all 4 or 5 of the copper ores mostly bornite that is non metallic till it is heated to 450 degrees. when exposed to the air it turns to a rainbow and one of these nuggets has a rainbow ring on it of very small bornite crystals. another has a gold center and silver outside and another half gold and half platinum. The springs in the area I believed have oxidized the mineral and dissolved the upper layer into fines combined with quartz and mixtures of a half dozen other rocks.

    Thanks Tom Glenn 

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