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Strategies & Market Trends : Winter in the Great White North -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill/WA who wrote (2792)	8/21/2002 7:14:41 AM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 8273

The geode may be chippable. Most often they are recognized by their spherical shape, which is rare, really, in stones. They can be many colours common to where they come from, and quite rough on the exterior, which is most often a mono-texture, which again is not that common. Most pebbles can be recognized for the rock they emanate from, such as granite, gabbro, etc,, and they will have crystals in their texture. If they are volcanic they will probably wear flattened and have striations. Often too the geode is cracked and crystals will form at the edges of the crack. Near all the placer areas of the world there are usually point source veins that feed the placer. These veins could be economic. That someone blasted this one does not mean it is not, and they just left it. On the other hand, it could be someone's claim. A map would tell. When you see gold, the rule is to stake. Perhaps it was missed by assay. You never know, and cannot assume. I don't know what mineral you saw that was gold colour but it could me muscovite mica, which is also known as sericite. This could be an indicator of gold in veins. It could be pyrite which is also an indicator.(I would think you wold know pyrite) The key to gold is the rock it came from and the habit of the quartz emplacement. Deep blue-green rock with rust and pyrite and deep colour, grey to white quartz and rock that fizzes with the application of HCL (you can get 10% hydrochloric in a drugstore) -- these are indicators. The Whiteshell (name?) gravels of the Dawson area were a white and green rock with mica that is identical in type to Kerr Addison mine ore back in Ontario. Other things to look for are parallel shears with quartz and calcite, ladderwork white quartz veining, fractured or ground rock, and micas on the vein edge. Rusty quartz is the neon sign of productive veins. But it does not have to be rusty. Veinlets of any colour could be interesting for different reasons. Shearing and signs of tension fractures are important. Gold will be in a vein that looks like it was injected in a ragged way into the rock. Veins are often discontinuous, and sinuous, and often may be just drips and draps of quartz in zones, seeming not more than a foot or so a time, but reporting as it were to a structure of shear lines, with mineral differentiation that is colourful compared to the surrounding rock. Veins will be in wider shear zones that my be zones of 100 feet or more wide. In major gold areas, parallelism could be for 1000's of feet, but veins are followed in the direction of the shears and may be continuous to continual for miles. If you find gold its like cockroaches. It signifies more and more will be found. Dawson has not revealed its hardrock sources as few prospectors know the art of hard rock gold hunting who do placer mining. The assumption for many years, wrongly was that the placer mines did not have economic sources but the gold came from granite. In some cases the sources were known as in California. There must however be vast undiscovered veins I would guess of economic grade in the California area not far from the placer mines. Some people did some drilling in Atlin for sources and found some veins. They did not develop any mines of note, but drilling in the mountains is tough. In Stewart, however that is how they found the Snip and Johnny Mountain, by tracing placer gold back to source. I first suggested this back in 1980 to a bunch of no good bastards who worked at Esso Minerals amongst whom was a man who was president of the BC and Yukon Miners Association. This lit up a bulb and later the rush was on. They sent me back to Toronto and I never got to participate. Ignorance and theft are legion. Never trust a mining man. They aren't just no good they are no goddamned good at all. Whitehorse has little or no gold that I know of. There is copper north of there. EC<:-}

To: Bill/WA who wrote (2792)	8/21/2002 8:24:03 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8273

If you are in a likely area by all accounts and it is not staked, it would not hurt to dig some real gravel, in a bed that has black sand, clay, and 15% boulders of note. (3 to 8 inches in diam. ) Preferrably dig in a fast running stream, but it could be a higher bank that was once the bed. (Former beds are up to 300 feet above the stream.) It could be 8 miles an hour or more. That is fast. "Riffly" water is good. Dig the gravel and wash and screen a bucket of it. Later when you get back to washington or some place nice, you could table, "rough" camel wheel or carefully pan it and save the concentrate for assay. Try to get the lab to do an assay on the whole con, it should be 2 or 3 ounces, and tell you the total weight in milligrams of the bead as well as the weight in grams of the con. You have to get them to put the total con into a crucible for firing and weigh it. They don't want to do that as the con is large. But splitting it with their techniques is no good. They are careless and the gold is too variable to split or sample in lab properly. A 24 hour bottle roll cyanide of the con might be a good idea. It would help to be able to estimate what you could make money at. Eight to 50 dollars per cubic yard is good. (Estimate the total volume of originally dug gravel with boulders, with buckets, Screening and washing to 8 to 10 mesh with common hardware cloth will reject 65% to 90% of the feed.) If a lab gives you ounces per ton, then you have to figure the dilution back to the original sample in weight. So weigh your buckets with a bathroom scale, or against somethings you can weigh later with a board balance on a log. Just use some numbered boulders to balance against the bucket. Keep notes and weigh the boulders and you have the rough tonnage. In 20 shovels (~150 lbs) you should be able to get 0.75 dollars in gold for a good claim.(CDN dollars) 1.50 to 2 dollars would be dandy and 3 to 4 dollars -- stay right there and I will be up there in two weeks. One dollar in gold weighs 6/100 of a gram. That is 62 milligrams. That is a good chunk, but it may not impress the hell out of you. It is 3 mm by 1 mm by 1 mm or 1.47 mm on a side. 1.47 mm is 1/17 of an inch. Spread out in colour grains it will occupy an area of 1/8 of an inch square or the size of a dime approx if spread thin. If you pan gold, you throw away 1 to 2 dollars for every dollar you can concentrate. So if you take 70 14" 3-pound pans of gravel and concentrate it down to one dollar in gold, you probably have 30 dollars a ton, or 45 dollars a yard. That is rich. But few people would think that. Most people take a pan, see splash of colour and move on. The values are deep may be 15 to 60 feet, near bedrock and may be 20 times what you measure on the surface. In fact most operations could only recover 15 dollars of that by sluicing. Most people overestimate the gold's value they see in a pan, and vastly underestimate the value of the claim from the gold they can collect in a pan. That is why so much gold goes unworked. That and most sluicing operations are very bad and lose most of the gold. 96% of the gold in a claim is fine, and must be recovered for economics. The prospectors who tell you they are only looking for nuggets will never make a buck. Recovery is the key. To test a claim you must dig and screen a mound that reaches up to your knees. About 150 to 300 pounds It may only generate 30 to 50 pounds of fine sand. This is what you pan. It would be a good idea to mix it with coarser gravel pea size as the panning is much faster and easier. For every test mound of gravel you will generate 10 to 20 pans of sand, which will take you perhaps 2-3 hours to work down. It would be better to have small rocker, or camel wheel to work you sands and it more uniform. You could make a camel wheel by using a dished pan of sorts with a hole and collection cup in the centre and gluing plastic strips in a spiral toward the centre. Fasten it to a bicycle pedal hub on a 30 degree tilt and spin by hand. EC<:-}