SUCCESS OR
FAILURE
Sometimes, it takes
years to learn what a claim's true potential is. During these days of extravagant gold prices, assessing what remains in the ground becomes important info. With gold mining claims, one need consider all previous mining and exploration work. If you've been working the claim for a spell, it's conceivable both you and your predecessors raked off only the easy-to-get-to surface gold. Auriferous ore could be
scattered about that worked-over property in plain sight; gold-bearing detritus masquerading as 'leaverites', that is, ordinary rocks. If you were to gather some highly-mineralized float pieces and have that ore assayed, who knows what tenor of value you might find locked up inside a ton of it? Have you ambitious young prospectors given that idea much thought? Maybe the best pay remains buried beneath you in deep
leads. These could be placer leads, lode leads (hard rock gold), or both. Just because gold hasn't made itself obvious doesn't mean your claim is worthless. Gold-bearing anything,
whether alluvial or lode, holds great commerical promise during times of insanely-high gold prices. If you're looking to buy a
claim outright instead of locating one, it's conceivable what somebody is offering holds no minable gold whatsoever. In the claims department,
there's countless scenarios a person may find himself confronted with. What if you obtained the mineral rights to a claim known to harbor an excellent, minable gold deposit. Hoping to further prospect and work your new holdings, all the necessary paperwork is filed with Uncle Sam. Even after doing everything in compliance with the bureau's demands, they still deny you the permits needed to start up an operation. That's the pits, cause without
permits, one's mining plans can be DOA. A righteous, promising property becomes a case of you operationally-hamstrung and holding on to useless paper. If getting permitted to use water poses the chief regulatory hurdle,
maybe your plan for processing gravels won't require the use of water. What seemed a hopeless situation might be remedied. 'There's more than one way to skin a cat' and extract gold from the ground. In this business,
creative solutions, thinking outside the box, sometimes produces positive
results. Call it holistic mining if you will.
Consider down-sizing and becoming a small-scale
operation. Dry-mining with drywashers or
even metal detectors might be viable MOs on ground possessing the right characteristics. Neither method requires the use of regional water resources. If paydirt is rich
enough, hand-mining may be the answer. Hauling pay off the claim to a remote
processing site could provide another solution. In coarse gold country and in
extremely rich ground, such crafty tacks may be the answer to your
dilemma. Do whatever you can to mine because, if you own or acquire minerals
rights, then, by golly, it's your right to. With current gold prices, a sturdy,
hard-working, driven person with or without a crew would be foolish not to
process as much good, gold-bearing gravel as possible by any and every means
available. Am I right?
Most shallow claims in
the lower contiguous 48 states which contained good placer ground at one time
have been hammered by three or four generations of miners. One to three foot
deep gravels are relatively easy to mine by hand methods. Deeper gravel
deposits with undisturbed expanses of ground, on the other hand, may hold gold
close to bedrock, but only testing will bear that out. On hard-hit,
shallow-bedrock claims, your best opportunity for finding payable amounts of gold
lie in recent redeposits of flood gold. Another avenue to consider is this. With sky-high gold prices, someone using
a system designed to capture super-fine gold might fare well reworking old
tailings. Also entertain the notion that tailings themselves could be comprised
of a high percentage of rich gold ore mixed in with the other non-auriferous,
unconsolidated alluvium.
With respect to
enrichment in recent times, promoters telling you their claim has replenished
itself could be accurately describing the claim. What isn't mentioned is 'how
much' the claim has been replenished. I seriously doubt many claim promoters
know the answer. In some ways, that's advantageous to prospective miner-types.
It means ground hasn't actually been prospected in recent times. No two claims
are ever quite the same. Comprehensive sampling is imperative if you're ever to
prove up a property. Beyond that, better recovery systems have the potential to
make formerly unprofitable mines profitable. What happens much of the time is that gold,
if present, is concentrated on or near bedrock surrounded by packs of behemoth
boulders. How do you test bedrock with twenty or thirty feet of overburden above
it and boulders the size of VWs down there? You don't. That's how. Not your
average Joe like you or I. Maybe you'll get lucky and score a shallow-bedrock
claim containing few big rocks; a claim holding surface deposits, bedrock gold,
and bench reserves to boot. No one will ever know what's what until they've
tested the ground. Whether you're dredging twenty feet underwater working a
boulder pack or opening up an ancient terrace five hundred feet out of the
river-bottom, breaking into 'the bank', i.e. repositioning big rocks so you can
access gravels amongst them will pose challenges you had not forseen, were never
informed of, and most likely won't be able to overcome. Thanks for checking out my store.
Gold of Eldorado 6-5-12
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