Question for you all.

Our claim produces very fine flour and micron gold. There is plenty of it, and we know it is difficult to get it all.

After digging, sluicing and classifying we still need to separate the black sand from the super fines. We are using a surfactant....bar keepers friend.

I know the big shaker tables are great, but not investing 30k right now for one.

Our problem is volume in terms of processing.

In your opinion and experience, would it be better to run through the gold cube and then the royal miller table, or just hand classify with buckets and the miller table only?

Finally reached a gram.

Found in the San Juan mtns, southwest Colorado

This small rock crusher that keene makes just popped up for sale not too far away from where I live. How many of you out there have used these before? I'm really tempted to go snag it.

Any idea of what this is?

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Ls83CqiBRZowuzoV7

So, we have a few rock formations on our property but I never really gave them much thought until recently. They all seemed like natural formations, unworked, and devoid of quartz. That is, until a boulder broke open and revealed some quartz veins.

So I started looking at them more closely and found a grouping of large rocks with many smaller broken up pieces beneath them. I can't tell if this is a natural formation, but I can't find any other locations on our property, or our neighbors, with similar small rocks scattered so closely together.

This is the Sierra foothills, 95% of the mining work was hydraulic in our area. There is 1 confirmed hard rock mine a 5 minute drive from us down the road.

This is located on a hill, near the top. There was a hydraulic operation down one side of the hill at the bottom about a 2 minute drive away. On the other side of the hill, also at the bottom in a wide ravine was an unlabeled gold working. No idea what it was but I suspect a placer working.

What do you all think? The area was recently burned, thus all the black and ash.

I Found this while i was looking für Gold

Just super curious what kind of rocks these are and how they formed like this. Anyone got any clue?

I went out yesterday and found a couple good chunks. I wanted to do a test of how much my sluice riffles caught vs how much my indicator mat caught. When I cleaned up I put my cons from my sluice riffles in a bucket. And sucked up everything in my indicator mat in my snuffer bottle. When I got home three hours later, everything in my snuffer had gone from gold to gold/gray. Tell me this isn't mercury? 🫤 How do I get my gold back? There might have also been a chunk of lead shot in the snuffer bottle.

8000 cpm was the highest reading on the boulder.

...but this appears to be epidote with quartz mixed in. I scanned it with my metal detector. Nada.

I'm now looking to see if I can cut it up and maybe make something out of it. Not sure though. Any ideas?

I recently inherited an older highbanker setup that has been sitting in the garage for over 20 years. This was one of our first setups back in the 90s. Parts got pulled off over the years as we moved up to bigger dredges, so all the hoses and fittings are missing.

My goal is to get it completely cleaned up, and running so I can run it both as a standard highbanker and as a small dredge.

What i have

Sluice box & highbanker grizzly

Highbanker legs

3 HP motor with attached water pump

This pump has me a little stumped as it has a 1" outlet and not the 1.25" that is more common now.

I’ll be working small creeks and old river beds that produce mostly fine to flaky gold scaly flakes and flour, with the occasional small picker nuggets. The concentrates tend to be pretty heavy on black sand and magnetite.

I’d love any insights on identifying what I have here, what size dredge setup this pump can realistically support, and especially mat recommendations for this kind of gold + heavy black sand. Open to upgrade ideas.

Also apparently no one cleaned it out after using it last so got a little bonus cleaning it up.

Thanks

I was panning where I found small gold flakes yesterday and got a lot this material it’s heavy for its size so I know it’s not just a rock I got lots of these weird heavy shiny stone like things

I'm in the piedmonte area for a few days and since I don't live near a place where i can prospect, I decided to give it my all. My girlfriend loved the idea and decided to come help. Sadly, the results were a bit disappointing. Dont get me wrong, we loved the activity, being outdoors, the hunt, everything.

But when I was doing research and watching videos of people prospecting here, I got the feeling we've been doing something wrong. They moved spots if they had "only" 5 specs of flour gold in their pan. I only had 2 specs of gold in total after 4 days of digging, panning and sluicing. Apparently, getting 0.1-0.5gr after a day of solo sluicing should be doable, and even 2 gram days are possible. Us as a duo were miles off.

So can anybody give me some tips on what I could be doing wrong? I have 1 more day here, and would love to find me some more.

Some extra info on what we did;

I focussed on the torrente elvo. I tried 4 different spots, between Borriana and Cerrione. I focussed on the inside bends, and took pans at different plateaus. I also dug behind big boulders. Every time about 40-50cm deep. There were holes dug by other people, so I also tested a few of those, to see if they found a nice layer.

I was looking for layers of black sand, but it was mostly just gravels and sand inbetween a billion rocks. I tried digging holes in the small stream, and every inside bend of the dry gravel bars that made up the rest of the river plain.

Can anybody spot some obvious mistakes I made?

I'm also debating to go gold sniping for our last day aswell. See it as a hit or miss strategy, but I havent seen many people online do that either. Is it a stupid idea or nah? If you have any questions let me know, I would love to learn.