Hey, this is Prospector Jess,
I’m sure you’ve heard of flood gold, but what is snow gold?
Tonight we’re going to talk about this, which is kind of what’s coming for tonight, in the way of snow. Another two to three feet in the high Sierras.
That’s all that red stuff over there. no, that’s, that’s on top of, you know what we saw, I just posted a post showing, you know, quite a few feet. I don’t know what they’re up to now, but it’s probably pushing 20 feet in the top of the Donner pass. They’re down to one lane on I 80. That’s like a, you know, five, four lane, five lane kind of thing or more, maybe six lanes going each way in our interstate. So if I 80 is shutting down to, to one wagon trail, we got a problem Houston.
But we also have what I observed to be an opportunity and that is that when snow comes down, you know, as, as they say what comes down, it must go down further. You know, what goes up must come down. Well, this is hard to come down, but it’s got to go down further to make it to the ocean because that’s where equilibrium is once snow melts.
So watch this. I’m going to go through tonight a little bit and kind of explain a bit about what I’m getting at. But what I’m saying is this red stuff is stacking on top of 10 to 20 feet of snow already. So that means we’re going 12 feet to 20 to 24 feet. that’s a lot of water and this snow pack has been relatively heavy, which means it’s high end, high end water density. And that means a, an interesting feature when it comes to floods. So I’ll talk a bit about that in a second, but I just wanted to ask you the question. What is snow gold? It’s a term I just invented for the purposes of tonight’s video explanation.
So again, when these big storms are coming through, the atmosphere at river continues and we ended up with lots and lots of water coming down in the form of precipitation and in the form of crystals, ice, snow, hail. And so both of those have the, the ability to create floods and to move gold if they’re large enough volume. Well, what we’ve got right now is a situation where we’re having a little bit of both. We’re having floods and we’re going to have more floods through the spring and into the summer, potentially four areas of the central valley here in California.
This is true though, all the way up the cascades and probably into British Columbia. And so this is really an unusual year when it comes to moving gold in the potential of what’s going to happen. It’s also an unusual year and it’s starting to bring back memories of people who, a year or two ago, we’re predicting that we may be onto a flood season comparable to what in the 1860s here in California, it literally shut the state down for over a month.
Water was so high that all the streets in Sacramento, we’re flooding all of the, all of the buildings. So basically you’ve got the water levels rising to building levels and basically nobody could occupy any of the state capitol. So it shut down, our government. Hmm, that’s an interesting concept, but it also created havoc and it was one of the worst years in terms of overall, damage to the state. And so it’s not something you would look forward to this year, but there is one silver lining to this storm, if you will. And that is the potential to move gold. we’ve talked about this over and over again this month. it’s kind of our flood gold month. but in this case we’re going to talk about snow, the crystal and or solid form of water. What happens when that solid form warms up?
Let’s take a look. So I’m going to flip you over to my desktop here and we’re going to go over here to a full screen on the desktop. So, again, we’re still offering the Gdu, the gold diggers underground prospectors Bonanza club thing. And that’s where he can learn a lot more about what I had to say about this. And there’s a bunch of videos on how water moves gold and how gold, concentrates and traps and, and how rivers can be read, how you can look at minerals and rocks and you know, things like that and put this whole thing together. It’s, it’s my integrated picture of how to find more gold. So I just want to bring that up. so let’s take a look at what the u s government, “weather.gov” ‘s, site is saying, basically i’ve got a “snowcast” for today as in snow forecast for today.
You know, we’re looking, we’re looking at, what’s happening. It’s Wednesday right now. but the snow forecast is from Wednesday through Thursday. They’re expecting along this red zone where it’s deep, deep red. There is going to be 30 to 36 inches of snow pack building up. And at a minimum and the yellow part, you’re going to get eight to 10 inches. So you know, you’re going to get a foot of snow or up to three, maybe possibly even three and a half feet of snow here, building up in the Sierras on top of an already existing snowpack that’s tens of feet deep. So this thing is adding more. Last weekend set a record. And so it’s like this whole thing is, is you know, “global cooling” dream. but basically what you’re going to have is a ton of material, tons and tons, tera-tons, that has built up and is stored behind those reservoirs.
eep, deep red. There is going to be 30 to 36 inches of snow pack building up. And at a minimum and the yellow part, you’re going to get eight to 10 inches. So you know, you’re going to get a foot of snow or up to three, maybe possibly even three and a half feet of snow here, building up in the Sierras on top of an already existing snowpack that’s tens of feet deep. So this thing is adding more. Last weekend set a record. And so it’s like this whole thing is, is you know, “global cooling” dream. but basically what you’re going to have is a ton of material, tons and tons, tera-tons, that has built up and is stored behind those reservoirs.
So much so, and it’s so wet and heavy that it’s likely to create a scenario where it overtops the reservoirs. They cannot hold it all. we have not done a very good job managing our reservoirs over the past few years and we’re finally in a stage now where we’re trying to build water back up. And you get into situations where politics interferes with mother nature, with, with acts of God.
And what happens when, weather conspires to move material like water in such volumes that we can’t even conceive of it. And so this snowpack represents the greatest reservoir of water in the state of California. And typically the reservior is tapped all spring, summer, and sometimes into the fall for feeding all of the coastal areas such as San Francisco, all the way to Los Angeles. And so, and so he ended up with all these aqua ducts coming out of all these dams and reservoirs.
The reservoirs are filled with water and feed both human water needs and agriculture, which is the main use for that water. And so what ends up happening is when you involve politics (eg. fish and dam removal,) you divert some of that water out into the delta and into the ocean. So you basically bypass it and throw it away. that has consequences.
The consequences being that you tend to do the wrong thing at the wrong time and can easily end up with your reservoir is in the wrong state. And so they can become like Oroville where they start flooding out and overtopping and a lot of these big reservoirs along the Sierra Nevada right through here are in that state right now. They’re about to, you know, approach topping. And then when this stuff starts to melt in the spring, they will over top. When that happens, you’re going to get this kind of situation building up, which is already starting as of right now.
So you can see this as a massive area that has just announced a huge flood warning. and what they’re telling you don’t drive across flooded roads. Be Aware. trust me, if you tried to move out and moving water, it looks pretty still and you and your thinking idyllic, you know, this is kind of like what, what it’s like if I’m swimming in a river or a lake or whatever. No, it’s not.
This is danger.
You know, you, you just drop your, for your front two tires in and if it starts to move that, it’ll drag the rest of your car in and you’ll be history. You will not make it out alive. And so it’s one of those things where they have to warn people year after year.
But the biggest cause of loss of life due to natural causes in terms of, in terms of catastrophes is not hurricanes. It’s not tornadoes, it’s not earthquakes, it’s floods.
And so, you know, you’ve got to keep your eyes open under these conditions. So what’s happening here? Well, what’s happening right now is the precipitation from the rains is moving through these areas, especially the burn areas. And that’s Redding, Chico around around the Paradise fire. And then we have several fires that have occurred down in the southern area here. We had the Telegraph fire and we had, the Rim fire and then we had the Mariposa thing. I forget what that was called this year. but we’ve had a bunch of fires all through this section.
And then on the west side we’ve had all kinds of fires up in here around clear lake and, and so forth. So what, what you’re getting is it’s time that the water starts flooding through, when it falls.
Now that’s not the snow melt. So let’s take a look at this picture. So this was at snow cast, snow, Snow cast, trade trademark. this was the snow forecast that we have for right now. what we’ve had though is some huge snow forecasts, in the recent history that, that, came through like last weekend where this thing was, you know, like purple.
It was all the way to the Max and then some. And so reading got a huge amount, a ordering and got a huge amount, stopped some trains over the last couple of days. Washington, same thing. So we have this huge snow building up all the way up and down, the cordilleras and all the way up and down the Sierras and, and so on, into the cascades. And so you’ve got this, you know, rocky mountains are getting it. We’re getting it.
Everybody’s getting it. So let’s take a look at what’s going on. Oh, and you hit, still have our precipitation forecast, which is, you know, the rain itself, which is what’s causing the flooding right now. Now that’s half to one inch, two to three inches in grass valley. one to two inches in Yosemite. So that’s enough rain to cause them some serious flooding. Especially like Yosemite with all the fires that have been through there in the last couple of years. We’ve talked about that in other videos. So what’s going on here right now is we have a situation where we have to watch out that, that you know, that snow when it melts is going to cause a problem down in these areas in the 1860s, I don’t remember the specific year. I’d go look that up. there was the, that fantastic flooding that occurred. It was exactly this kind of scenario where the flooding conspired with another atmospheric river situation.
In fact, that was the first one that they now believe was the first really recorded atmospheric event in that there were actually interviews of Indians that said this is the year for, and they had some Indian name for the big waters. And essentially what they predicted was the, I believe it was Miwoks, moved out of the valley, up out of the lowlands and into the hills and mountains to get up high enough to avoid the flooding that occurs during these things.
So this isn’t something new. This has been around way before the fat of global warming and everything else way before anybody politically announced it. These people knew of what the conditions were and one of the things they use to predict it was some level of understanding of, of the calendar, but they also knew certain events. We’re Harbinger’s of this kind of condition.
And the events were very much what we’ve been seeing, where you get these anomalous big storms, cells moving through, tornadoes, things like that happening and, and, large amounts of snow building up in the high Sierras. And then if that starts to happen, they just moved up and out. They said, this is, you know, this is the big one and we don’t want to drown.
So, that’s what we have to look forward to this spring when that happens. You can also imagine that in the, in the summer and fall when things start to abate a little bit in these big streams. And that’s something to avoid during these periods. when it starts the flood level starts dropping, you’re going to have moved a tremendous amount of gold and a tremendous amount of ore and cobbles and rocks in. So it’s going to be reburied re concentrated removed and tearing into mountain sides and hillsides on the way that, that have long been illegal to hydraulic mine.
Well, you know, nature’s about to hydraulic mine on a scale we seldom see.
And so, so this is something just to be aware of. I’m not trying to make light of these hardships that people are going to face or are facing in these areas. I’m just trying to point out from a gold prospectors perspective, this is how it happens.
And so that’s kind of tonight’s discussion.
Again, you’ve got snow levels, you know, rise to 6,000 feet, but they’d drop as low as 1500 feet. I knew of a few places that I prospected are right at that level. And so there’ll be under snow right now and ice and be kind of painful to get it in the water unless you got a heater on your, on (your dredge, which is illegal) and all that good stuff. So it’s one of those fun things that you can look forward to is when this stuff Claire’s out, it should be a lot more gold concentrated, but it’s not going to be ordinary flood goal.
It’s going to be snow gold. The snow gold occurs though when it floods because of rapid heating in the Sierras. When that rapid heating hits that pack, that snow pack we’re talking about right here is going to come out of there and it’ll, it can come out much faster than rainfall because it’ll take feet of snow and correct it into a cubic feet of water, you know, and these rivers that normally run maybe 80 to 90 cubic feet per second, we’ll be running thousands of cubic feet and those that run tens of thousands, we run a hundred to 800,000 cubic feet.
They’ll be way over there, way over there, a flood lines ripping everything that’s on the side, tearing at the rip rap and things like that, that, that formed the river channel. And the channels will start to move.
And when they move, you’ll see like it’s happening right now in the San Gabriels that’s happening up there. we’re having it happen. Several people have posted some things up in the Yuba river area. We’re already seeing the gold is moving, the river’s changing its course, and that will change where gold will be found.
So that’s it for tonight. I just thought I’d do you a “Snow cast” for tonight?
Prospector Jess … Weatherman for a day.
Good prospecting! Over and out, see you tomorrow night.
