GOLD MINING

When it comes to gold mining, most of us will get our yellow metal by sifting through sands and gravels along rivers and streams. This is called placer mining. It is due to the geological age of the earth that this is even possible. All gold deposits started as hardrock formations...and stayed that way until there were earthquakes, rivers, glaciers, tidal waves and a lot of earth movement which eroded mountains and ground down the rock into it's smallest form; dust. Trapped in all this rock were veins of gold, typically in quartz. These veins were also pulverized down into small pieces in nugget, flake and flour size. Because gold is so heavy, it settles to the bottom of our rivers, streams and any deep depression or crevice. This is where placer mining comes in. When we sift through all this sand and gravel to separate the gold, we are actually looking back at the earth's history. I know, I know, that's nice; now show us a faster way to get at this gold.

The quickest way to reach this heavy mineral is to go deep and that is the hardest thing we could possibly do. Most placer gold is found within 50 feet of the surface of the ground. That's the "easy pickens". It is all the piles of gravels and sand we have to move first before we can reach the heavy nuggets. All this unwanted material is called "over burden" and it is the over burden that will make or break a mine. There are some very rich areas containing coarse gold that travels for miles following the bedrock of the earth, but there are just too many feet of rock and assorted mineral debris sitting on top of it to make it worthwhile to mine. This is just one of the reasons I am developing the deep gold drill to reach these zones of wealth that no one else can reach.

These golden rich layers vary in thickness from 18" down to a thin hair like trace. If we were to trace back to where these layers started from, it would be an intrusive outcropping of very rich veins that have been crudely eroded and strewn across bare rock or been given enough time to settle to bedrock. Glaciers and tremendous earth movements have left these rich zones buried deeply with over burden. California has one of these very rich areas. The surface of which has been the ancient streambeds that were worked in the gold rush of 1848 to 1855 (1849 being the height of this rush). These semi-surface ancient streams were often mined with hydraulic mining techniques. Please keep in mind that these mined areas often had 40 feet of unwanted rock sitting on top of them and were up a mountain side nowhere near water. That is one view of where gold was. The other is the heavy rich layer that sits on bedrock down deep under the earth. Some of these bedrock areas were accessible by miners usually by diverting rivers and digging down to the heavy layer.

Every method was employed to extract the wealth. Gold panning, sluicing, dredging and hydraulic mining were all used to good effect. Some outcroppings of hardrock gold were also found. At the time, crude attempts at crushing this mostly quartz rock were used to try to free the yellow treasure from the parent rock formations.

This crushed slurry was washed into massive sluice boxes and a lot of gold was captured. Using this early method only captured about 70% of this mineral wealth. The rest ended up in huge tailing piles left behind by these stamping mills. Early "worked areas" can be successfully re-mined using the cyanide process for complete removal of all gold still held in the waste rock.

Normally I would encourage a person to pursue these bedrock zones, but not at the cost of your life. Miners in the gold rush of 1858 in Barkerville, British Columbia often "drifted" down to bedrock, extracting huge quantities of coarse gold by tunneling along these rich placer deposits and simply follow the golden highway wherever it went. What isn't talked about too much is the loss of life that happened all too often. Miners were buried by cave ins in their frenzy to get more nuggets. These drifts were only 40 feet down, the depth of gravel sitting on top of most rich bedrock areas starts at 40 feet and goes to several thousand feet.;

You sometimes hear in the news when construction crews drill down on the bank of a river to set pilings for a new bridge and they hit coarse gold just as they hit bedrock. The layer is only 1 - 3 inched thick and can vary in depth down as I already mentioned. This is an all too common occurrence. Sometimes you hear about it but most times it isn't even mentioned in the news.

Other finds are discovered by water well drillers. It is their job to drill holes - everywhere - and they often find gold seams or rich layers as they drill down in search of water. Of course finding it is nice, mining it is another story. When you have 100 feet of mixed rock and sand on a one inch thick gold deposit, normal extraction techniques aren't going to cut it. These rich accumulations are somewhat spread out and do gather in depressions, cracks and crevices. That is why Billy Barker used a technique called drifting and tunneling to follow the paths of gold 40 feet underground. You have to be strong and determined to move that much earth for the narrow band or wealth that lay waiting on bedrock for thousands of years.

When I finish the deep gold drill I don't know if it will be a new method of mining or not. Early results of my prototype are promising. A brief description of the new type of drill is in the Future Gold Mining Projects.

1. High processing capacity.
2. Much easier than using a shovel.
3. Works under water.
4. Cleans to bare rock.