I recently sold a crusher to a geologist out of Las Vegas. He opted to make the short drive here instead of me shipping it. Glad he did! What a great guy! He even brought me 8 dvd's jam packed with over 2,000 files. (Video, Doc, PDF, etc) with tons of stuff on gold, prospecting, mining, physics (sound, light, radio waves, resonance, frequencies etc), equipment, tons of maps, AND a box of Krispy Kreme Donuts!

I learned a lot from him in the hour and a half he spent with me, and have months of data to pour through!

To make a long story longer, we got on the topic of “Gold Rush Alaska”, and the ineptitude of the crews there. We both agreed they are loosing more gold than they are getting!

So, all these crews run thousands of yards of materials a DAY! They talk about “getting down to pay”, and when they find a few specks in a pan they are all “high fiving” for the cameras!

I don't know if it was the show that aired on the 6^th of Feb, or the previous week, but when they scraped down to bedrock, they were excited to see quartz, and “knew they were on the pay dirt”.

Truth be told, had they tested the quartz, they may have found a LOT more gold, but when you run thousands of yards a day, AND your trommel classifies it down to like .250, well ANY quartz rock with gold in it OVER a ¼ inch, or even a ½ inch, goes right on through to the tailings pile.

All that large quartz rock (where the small pieces of gold they get came from in the first place) could and probably is gold laden, and they just shit it out on the rock pile! They should examine that rock, and bring in a good sized crushing plant and they might be able to double their season's take.

The only one I ever seen on that show who actually realized that ALL gold comes from the hard rock veins was Dakota Freds son Dustin who took a chopper and some gear way up above because he knew that the gold in the valley came from the outcrops up above in the mountains.

So, when you find color in a pan here is what to keep in mind. Keep testing as you work your way up the stream or wash and it should get better. At some point the gold you are finding might just disappear. At that point, you need to look to the left and right of the stream or wash, and work your way up the sides, looking for “float gold” which is pieces of quartz, or occasionally some other host rock that contains a bit of gold in it.

Eventually you will follow it up , and moving laterally as you work your way up, you will find a “triangle”, that is, the gold quartz tumbling down hill will fan out. As you get higher up, it is not as spread out. Once you get to the source, you will have found the outcrop that pushed out all that gold in the rivers.

The outcrop may well have decomposed and weathered away, which there would be no more gold in the spot. BUT that is how the old-timers found outcrops and veins. Some were pocket gold where the quartz is totally gone but an extremely rich pocket, or indentation of a lot of gold for those who look for it.

One of the things you hear a lot about is looking on old tailing piles with a metal detector. They say that the old timers left a lot of gold in those piles. I guess they are STILL doing it! Don't through away the possible “lion's share” of the gold.

And then there is Silver. A guy I came across years ago was selling a “gold mine”. Well I thought why would someone sell a gold mine if it were viable.? Good question, right?

I could not help but call the guy and talk to him. He said the gold mine was producing a ¼ ounce per ton. Ok... so why dump a gold mine that can produce a ¼ ounce per ton? The reply was “My silver mine runs 30 ounces per ton!” So, working the silver would pay out nearly twice what the gold mine would provide, and he wanted money for bigger equipment to process the silver.

I have to wonder how many millions the crews of Gold Rush toss out each year because they are not crushing that quartz stuff. Even if they classify at ½ inch in the trommels, how many ¾+ inch nuggets get dumped when you are talking thousands of yards a day.?

Bottom line... when you find some gold in your pan, sluice, dry washer etc, PONDER over where the source of that gold came from!