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24HourNut
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Posted: 01:34 am |
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Rick, I love it! Thanks for Part Two!
The best human beings start good new topics and vote on the better posts.
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speer34
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Posted: 03:33 am |
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Rick,
Thanks for the story. This is awesome. Do you by chance happen to have any pics from those days of your mining adventure? It would be cool to see a pic of you and Athena faithfully but your side.
Can't wait for part three.
I know absolutely nothing about panning, detergent, third runs, square pans, etc, but I LOVE the story.
Speer34
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shirohniichan
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Obscurius per obscurum
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Posted: 11:29 pm |
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Great story! I just drove by Randsburg this past Sunday on my way back from the Owens Valley. I'm glad to hear there's still a lot of gold to be found in those old ghost town areas. 
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Robodoon
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Posted: 12:56 am |
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Well that was really fun, best of luck ;)
"...we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the US, ...conspiring with others around the world to build ...-- one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it." David Rockefeller
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Robodoon
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Posted: 01:13 am |
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RICKC300 wrote:
Part two!
I had never heard of that before, putting egg shells in coffee. I was thinking OK, now I am going to have little bits of egg floating in my coffee instead of grounds at the bottom of the cup, yummy! Surprisingly, it works, the old percolator type coffee pot with the old metal mesh for the grounds always leaves some real fine grounds in the cup but his didn’t and no egg taste or bits either. Anyway, he fried up 6 eggs, each over medium (I still can’t do 3 at once in one skillet without breaking at least one yolk, and he did SIX)! He served each of us 3 eggs, a half pound of bacon with some grilled toast cooked right over the flame which he then buttered. While we were eating he proceeded to crack another 3 eggs in the pan and scramble them and then left them in the pan off the heat after they cooked (I didn’t ask, I was still looking for egg in my coffee). When we were done eating he scraped the scrambled eggs onto the bacon plate and gave them to Athena (my dog) who wolfed them down in about 3 bites and then ate the plate because of the bacon grease that had soaked into it. I said she was faithful, I never claimed intelligent…
We got back to the subject of gold hunting, dry washing in particular and he told me he liked the bellows type like mine and had used one for years but in order to really move a good amount of dirt or if the dirt was a little damp nothing beat a blower type. Then he looked over my dredge and sluice box and we talked about wet hunting and then we got on the subject of panning. Have you ever used a square pan before? I asked. He looked at me like I was nuts, I chuckled and put a shovel full of my “good stuff” into my pan and submerged it in my wash bin loosening the sand and rocks around with my hand and then started rocking it back and forth under water and then I started pouring off the rocks and sand working it back and forth continuously until I had it down to the black sand and gold, about a minute later I handed him the pan with nothing but about a tenth ounce of gold in it. He made some exclamation of sweet Mary and the beauties again (I wish I’d written all of his sayings down, I heard some of the most colorful, funny and outrageous things come from that mans mouth) but I am getting ahead of myself. He looked at the pan, looked over at the bucket and asked is that from last night? I told him it was and how I stopped every fourth run to check for color before continuing on. What about that bottle you showed me earlier? That was from one run at the start of my glory hole I replied. Sweet Jesus, Christmas has come early for ya! I got out my other pan and dumped another shovel full into it and handed it to him, he did just like he had watched me do and in just a few minutes had it worked down to about another 10th ounce of gold, He laughed and said I gotta get me one of these! They make the little buggers multiply like rabbits in there! I laughed again, Come on Tom, let’s pan this bucket out before I start digging again. I could see in his eye he wasn’t going to go anywhere before knowing how much gold was in that bucket anyway so I figured I could cut my panning time in half and have another empty bucket before getting back to the digging. I grabbed my scoop and emptied out the dirt and rocks from the wash bin, added a few more drops of dish soap and set another empty pan down on the milk crate between us. We started panning, I went a little faster than he did at first and had my pan down to gold before he did and just poured it into the other empty pan and refilled my pan and started panning again. He got his down and emptied it into the pan too. These pans are pretty quick like I said and it wasn’t long before he was panning as fast as I was and in about 45 minutes he was pouring the last of the sand and rocks from the bucket into his pan as I was finishing mine up. A few minutes later he poured the last of the gold into the pan and I poured off the muddy water and refilled it with some from a jug that already had dish soap in it and washed it down getting the last few stray pieces of sand out until there was nothing but gold in clear water left. I poured off the water and handed it over to him. That is 5 ounces or a little more he said. I carried the pan over to my folding table, I pulled my scale out and poured the gold into it and started moving the weight bar up. Dang he was good! It weighed in at 5 and ¼ ounces. I did some math in my head adding the 1.35 ounces plus already in my bottle, the other gold from up north and Colorado and realized I had got my pound of gold in 6 months (precious metal is weighed in Troy ounces and there is 12 ounces to a Troy pound). I was doing the math in my head and thinking maybe I could do this for a living after all! Tom was smiling… He new what was going through my young mind (or at least I thought he new). Well young man, ya better get back to work. I am going to run back to my place but I’ll be back in a bit with some stuff for ya. Do ya have a gun? He asked. That kind of stopped me short for a second and I thought maybe I had missed something. I told him yeah, I got a 12 gauge (that I could legally carry in California at age 18) and a .45 (this I couldn’t legally carry but had been raised with the saying I would rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6 any day of the week). Good he said, don’t go flashing that stuff around, you never know who may want it more than you do. He also told me to hide most of it and just keep a little bottle for show if someone comes around checking to see if you are having any luck. I told him I would do that (I already had been doing that). He bid me good luck as he loaded his box back in his Bronco and drove off.
I filled the gas tank, fired up the engine and started digging again. I did 2 runs of half an hour each before checking my third run. It weighed out at a 10th ounce so I was still doing really well. I ran three more runs and checked the forth, I panned out about the same amount (I didn’t weigh it this time). Just as I was walking back to my dry washer I heard Athena bark and then I heard a vehicle, it was Tom coming back hauling an old pickup bed made into a trailer behind his Bronco. He pulled in next to my truck and climbed out. Ya still gettin color? It’s still there I said, maybe not as heavy as last night but still pretty good. I brought a couple things to make life easier on ya. Give me a hand and help me unload will ya? I walked over to his trailer (he had plywood sides built up and I couldn’t see in before he opened up the back door) He had a blower type dry washer, a generator and a spinner in there. Not to mention shovels, pick hammers and something I was wondering about, a shop vac. Ya sweeping the rock when you can’t dig anymore? I was and told him I so. This does better he said, you breaking up the loose bedrock too? With my shovel I said. We carried that generator over to by the table, the blower type dry washer over to my digging grounds after we moved mine out of the way. He said, you are doing good but let me show a little something OK? Sure I said. He fired up his dry washer (much quieter than mine) and handed me my shovel grabbed one of his and said let’s dig. He tossed a shovel full in and it went through it in nothing flat, come on dig! I started digging, tossing shovel after shovel in and that wonderful machine kept up with us. Mine would have been loaded up by now and I would be leaning on my shovel waiting for it to catch up. We dug as much in 10 minutes as I had been running in 2 runs of a half hour each. HOLY CRAP! I have got to get one of these things, I’ll be the king of all prospectors and retire by the time I’m 30 I thought! We dug another 10 minutes or so and then he grabbed a broom and swept clean about 5 feet of the rock we had just unburied while I kept feeding the blower. He beckoned me over and swept his sweepings into my shovel. I walked it over and put it in the blower tossed in another shovel of dirt and went back for more of the sand he swept up. I kept doing this until he had the rock swept clean. He walked over, shut off the motor and asked “Whatcha ya think”? I laughed and told him about my thoughts earlier when we had first started. It was his turn to laugh then. He showed me how to open up the blower and empty it into a bucket. Let’s pan he said. I carried the bucket up to my wash bin and cleaned it out again. We each poured about a ¼ of the bucket into a pan and went to work. He told me to just stop when I got it down to the heavy sand and gold. We panned that bucket in less than 5 minutes that way. We both could see a decent amount of gold in the sand so we knew it was a good run. He pulled the starter on the generator plugged in his spinner and turned it on. Tilted it back and poured the sand and gold into it. Then he grabbed an extension cord and plugged it in and then his shop vac into that and said come on. We went to the area he had swept and he started vacuuming all the cracks and crevices and knocking loose rocks with his hammer as he went along. He pried one chunk of rock loose and pointed. Under that rock was a layer of gold flakes! He vacuumed them up and kept going until he had chiseled all the loose rocks out and had cleaned all the exposed bedrock we had just dug out, man it was so clean you could eat off it I think. He lifted the shop vac hose up with it still running over his head “Gets any gold caught in the riffles of the hose down into the vac” he said. He then turned it off and carried it up to the wash bin, took the lid off and poured all the sand, rock and gold into one of the pans. He handed it to me and said go ahead and take it all the way down, let’s see what the rocks had been trying to hide from us. I started panning and added more detergent to the pan because this was some really fine stuff and I didn’t want any to float away on me (adding a couple of drops of soap makes “wet water” and keeps really fine gold from floating on surface, this is from the surface tension of water and before adding the detergent I could see flakes floating, as soon as the soap hit you could see the ripple and they all sank). In just a few minutes I was stunned again because there was a lot of gold in the pan. We weighed it up, just a hair under a ¼ ounce! I looked at the 30 or so feet of tailings where I had reburied the bedrock as I was moving down the hill. I knew I had to dig it all up again and clean that rock like he had just showed me! He then took me over to the spinner, and low and behold the catch basin had gold and a lot of it! He shut it off and gave it to me to weigh, exactly 7/8th of an ounce! Over an ounce in an hour of work! (I am going into a lot of detail of these first couple of days with Tom, because he was an integral part of the following summer and you will get an idea of how we worked together, became great friends and formed a business partnership). Since this was technically public land anyone could dig anywhere they wanted, it was just kind of courtesy that one didn’t dig too close to an area where someone else was digging. With his tools, I knew I would do much better and faster than I had been, so I offered a fifty-fifty split with him on everything we found and also on fuel etc. He laughed and said it’s your glory hole so you should get 60 percent. It’s your equipment I said, so let’s go fifty-fifty. OK, That’s a deal he said but starting on the next run, this one is all yours. I told you he was a nice guy didn’t I? We worked about another 5 hours that afternoon until the sun was just starting to settle. We vacuumed, hammered and dug up another 30 feet of bedrock coming up with 5 and 7/8th ounces of the good stuff, or almost 3 ounces each for 5 hours work. A very impressive day to say the least, but not the best we would have. He didn’t have any family and said if I wanted to go home for Christmas, he would stay at the camp if I wanted to go be with the family. I told him I wanted to go into town and call again but that I had already told them I wouldn’t be home. He told me it was my choice. But that if he still had family he would be home for Christmas. I thought about it and agreed, I trusted him not to work it and take the gold and skip out (plus one side of me thought it had about run its course, it had slowed down the last 2 runs we had made and I really did want to be home for Christmas). I didn’t think he was going to work the hole and then run since he lived on his claim that was touching this spot. So I loaded my truck with all my equipment and left the tent, camp stove, table and wash bin there with him and wished him a Merry Christmas. I hit the road about 8PM and was home at 6 Christmas morning. To end this section of the story, Let me say I am glad I went home, I never missed a Christmas with Mom in my entire life and hers ended just 9 years later at the age of 55. I enjoyed the day with the family, told stories of my adventures and of my partnership with Tom, catnapped, took two showers and had the best home made meal I can ever remember having, even to this day. I left at about 11PM Christmas night and asked Dad to pick up 2 more square pans and bring them up with him next weekend for Tom. He had said he was coming up again next weekend to see how we were doing. I stopped and got a few little things for Tom on my way back to the site and got there at about noon the day after Christmas.
The final part (part three) will be posted in a couple of days after I read my notes and condense them into a couple of pages or so that will sum up the rest of my adventures with Tom and my Dog, Athena in the New year and Summer of 1984. Until then, Happy Hunting!
Rick
Wonderful and fun 
"...we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the US, ...conspiring with others around the world to build ...-- one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it." David Rockefeller
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foxglovepress
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NON-PC!!
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Posted: 04:16 pm |
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You're a wonderful story writer! I too, am looking forward to Part Three!
Justice for Mark.....Imprison Employers Who Hire ILLEGALS!
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THUMPER
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Posted: 08:19 pm |
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Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact. — Robert McKee
well done man,,,good read,,,looking foward...
 THUMPER
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BlackX
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Time Flies
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Posted: 04:35 am |
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Looking forward to reading the rest, Rick! That's great reading. Going to write a book eventually?
_Rich_
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