Hey, it’s Prospector Jess again. Welcome! Tonight we’re going to talk a little bit about placer gold and cobbles. We’re going to spend some time looking at some rocks, you know, these things, and talking about how that connects to placer gold and water and what we can learn from looking at a placer deposit. I also wanted to bring up a point. I got a message tonight on my phone from a longstanding Hunting4Gold prospecting fan, Charles, and he pointed out that he would like to know when we go live on this transmission, and I basically told him we go at 6:00 pacific time right now. But that brings up a good point. And so we’re looking into it, how to alert you guys, and I’d like to know if you’re interested, you know, go ahead and comment below if you’re interested in being alerted, we can figure out some way of doing that.
For now, I just need to know whether there’s enough interest. Being the techno geek that I am, you can see by the junk behind me, I kind of get caught up in fixing up stuff like that, especially when it relates to software and hardware, and the problem is that sometimes, you know, it’s showing a, you know, every nail is a hammer, well, every hammer looks for a nail; but you get the idea. So I just wanted to point out that we’re looking into it, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible, because I think that would be pretty neat if I could just kinda throw up a smoke signal and tell you when we’re going live, especially when I start doing some more remote stuff. Stay tuned…
So for now, we go back to our discussion earlier, we talked about, you know, different tools.
Well here’s another tool to add to your arsenal. This is a rock pick right here. This is rock pick, and so, we also have a chisel. And what would you use a chisel for? Well, again, both of these are marked the way I talked about in the last video. And so the idea is that, you know, you can put on your safety goggles and crack some of the rocks that are in there that have gold frozen into fissures. A lot of what you’re going to find when you’re looking at placer gold, is you’re going to find things that are driven into the rocks, and the only way to pull that stuff out, is to use techniques that are involved in crevicing, which is a technique of wedging the rocks open and, and prying, using some very small tools, you can build them out of screwdrivers, to rake the gold out.
And there’s some pretty good sized nuggets, a couple of our fans in the last week, sent in some pictures, I think I posted them on the facebook fan page. but you know, those are really gorgeous looking, not pickers, nuggets that have been driven into the rocks, and, you know, it takes you to go in there and seek them. So that brings me to tonight’s discussion, which is placer gold and cobbles. Looking at this picture right here, you can’t see my arrow again, technology impaired. But the idea is that we want to look at this picture and notice there’s silt behind this lip, this ridge here, and then there’s riffles, or rapids following this flow. This sill forms a place where basically the heavy material starts to aggregate or collect, and then the speed up in flow causes things to get driven further downstream in the rapids.
Right as it slows down, of course, what’s going to happen is right in the front edge of this, you’re going to start seeing some pretty serious gold drop out and get caught under the bigger cobbles and boulders. That’s an important thing to note.
But there’s something else I’m going to bring to your attention, and that is these cobbles have a certain characteristic, that I want to kind of focus on for a moment, and that characteristic, shown in my handy dandy gold pan here, but basically we have several different… Let’s flip you to live screen, show you the full picture.
So if we look at these cobbles, you can see this material has some distinctly different characteristics. This one over here, is largely rounded and has an interesting pattern. It’s very dark. This is what we would call an ultra-mafic. It’s heavy dense magnesium-ferric rock material and it tends to go with gold.
Now the thing I want to draw your attention to, isn’t so much the color or the heaviness, it’s the roundness. Notice how rounded the corners are on it, especially when you compare it to this one right here, this reddish looking piece of stained quartz. You know this is material that you’d be looking for. This comes out of essentially a fissure which is a hydrothermal injection. This is where a lot of gold gets found in this particular case, no gold, iron, no gold, okay, so, the redder the better, but in this case it’s lever right for lever right there.
So what I want to draw your attention to is to notice the jagged appearance of this. This was broken out using this chisel and a rock hammer, but it’s important to recognize that it’s fractured. When rock first breaks free of load, it’s going to be fractured and very sharp and jagged like that.
That’s new and fresh material. When it’s rounded like this one, or like this side of this rock, you know, if you look, it’s kind of rounded on this edge right here. I’m trying to get it at the right angle so you can see the rounding. I can show it in front of the pan.
See how it’s rounded corner here, right up in here. That effect is very important because it means it’s been in the stream bed for awhile, pounding out the gold, then pounding out any minerals. There may be gold in here, and that brings me to the other point.
This one is broken open because we were splitting quartz cobbles, or quartz boulders and stuff to find if they had any gold inside, and that’s kind of an important thing to do. You do that when the cobble looks stained black, blue or red and kind of dirty like this one does, and pockmarked.
These are the pockmarks, the little zits, those are basically formed when pyrite crystal breaks out or when you have some other hidden iron or gold bearing materials and any other crystalline minerals.
Sometimes when gold nuggets break open, you’ll get these little pits like this and down inside there you’ll see some gold. Not gold nuggets, but cobbles and rocks that have gold in them before they are gold nuggets. Now, why is that important? Because if you found one and it had some of that in there, then it might be worth having somebody etch that rock out to get the crystalline gold that would be buried inside of it.
That can be much more valuable to you than a gold nugget. But in general, a metal detector does quick work of this kind of material, and you can find out whether any of these and they all don’t squawk.
This one actually is a little bit of a hot rock, so it tends to kind of squeal a little bit on my mine lab, but, it doesn’t really squawk like gold. It’s a different kind of sound, so you can tune it out. So that’s it for tonight. I just wanted to touch bases with you again and let you know, a quick thing. We’re looking at stream flow and placer gold.
So when we look at this stuff, we’ve got our stream, and we’ve got the cobbles aggregating on the bottom and tend to be the big biggest roundest boulders are the ones that we’re interested in and all of this finer, either jagged stuff or find stuff up here is of less interest because it just doesn’t really capture that much gold unless it’s flour or very, very fine pickers.
So that’s it for tonight! We can, check to see how we’re doing, but for now I think we’ll close the show, and good prospecting!
See you tomorrow night!
I forgot to mention it earlier. Let’s see, you know, you can go to https://SourdoughMiner.com/20-20/ And look at the 20-20 report. It describes a lot of this water-flow and, and how this drives gold and cobbles and all that stuff into the various places that gold hides out.
Go check that out. That’s at SourdoughMiner.com. And we’ll see you then.
Catch you then. Bye. Bye.
