Good evening everybody. So tonight we’re going to talk about “where is gold is found in Washington state?”
I’ve been asked this question over and over again. So it’s time to touch Washington. I’m coming back over to the west coast and we’re going to visit that and show you what’s going on in this state map. I created this Washington state gold map using the USGS – MRDs system as I talked about in the “Government Gold Maps” how to instruction report (a.k.a GGM.) You can find that at https://SourdoughMiner.com/GGM/
And of course we still have the GDU offer is still up and running for now. So if you’re interested, there’ll be some links to that, on this page somewhere. And, take a look if you’re interested in finding more, click on through and join us.
Okay, so for tonight we’re going to talk quickly about, the gold locations and some special pointers about what’s unique about Washington and for that matter Oregon and northern California, there’s something special going on there. So let me take you over and we’ll look at that immediately because that’s important in the context of all of this band of gold through here. Not so much, well even up here a little bit, but more along in here. So let’s take a look at what we have to talk about. Geologically speaking.
So right here you see a picture of Mount Saint Helen’s. Now this photograph was taken. This is a lower part of Washington state and this has taken a just post eruption. So after it blew the top quarter of the mountain off, you can see that the mushroom clouds still venting in the middle of that top picture, and that’s in 1982 on May 19th. Now notice the picture down below is April of 2007 do you see the distinct difference? That is, in the lower picture. You can see the Dome in the middle of the mountain has grown significantly and you should see what it looks like now. They’re waiting for an imminent eruption from this mountain, but this is pretty typical of the “Ring of fire” activity which you get in Japan… You get this all along the coast, not coast, but all along the the mountain ranges that have any kind of, intrusive igneous activity going on because of remelted of magma and, new magma coming up from the mantle.
And so what happens is when this stuff is injected in, it creates these, these opportunities, these vents, which in turn creates something else. If you notice in both pictures, it’s not just rock and pumice ash coming out of this thing and smoke, there’s a lot of steam. Big hint; hydrothermal deposits play a huge role and metallic injection into the crust. So what you’re seeing here is literally gold inaction to some degree, mostly a lot of sulfuric materials, things like that. But there are metallic deposits being made around these volcanic mountains and that’s why I wanted to bring your attention to it in the context of our first picture.
So let’s go over to the full screenshot. So looking over here, you can see quickly how this whole region, this is down near Mt. Saint Helens, right in here. probably right around this area here. Let’s see if we could pull up a map or pull up one of the mines in the area.
So here’s the maybe mine and it produces bornite, Chalcopyrite. Remember we talked about Copper Sulfides, Cuprite, Malachite there’s another copper sulfide, pyrite, sphalerite. So notice the sulphur plays a big role in this stuff. The commodity number one is copper and silver with some zinc. And Gold is a byproduct. So this goes back to what I talked about last night, where that Chalcopyrite can, can mix in solution in the rock and the mineral and be valuable enough to produce, especially when you pull copper and silver out first. Because those are real commercial products of large quantity and you’ll have some side effect of having leftover zinc and gold. Both of those have commercial value as well. That’s an important aspect of this whole picture, but that’s in that very same region. Let me zoom in just for a second. I’m probably gonna mess my whole life up doing this.
Let’s see if we can’t find, there we go. There’s Mount Saint Helens rate there. And so, you know, as we zoom in to Mount Saint Helens, you notice on this northern flank we see a whole bunch of gold mines that existed up in this area. Norway, Sweden group, chalcopyrite. Here we go again, sulfides, Galena, pyrite, these are all sulfides and they all go along with vulcanism.
So this is kind of an important aspect of, of Washington and Oregon and northern California. As you’re going to find these volcanoes all through this region, everywhere, there’s one of these dots with the little volcano symbol on it, you’re going to find another volcano. Here’s Mount Hood in northern Oregon. go down toward a California and you’re going to see, north of Redding here. You’ll see Mount Shasta right here. And so all of these guys have that, that potential for producing those sulfides and producing some pretty terrific Goldwater in the process.
So I just wanted to bring that to your attention as we zoom around Washington state. here’s Mount Raineer, not far from Seattle and all around it. Again, a whole bunch of bands of the sulfide deposits. This one just has gold. That’s pretty good. I’ll take it. and so on. And then there’s a whole band on the backside of the Puget sound here on the east side, up in these mountains above. and, and in that there is an area and I don’t know whether I can find it or not. It’ll be fun trying to pull it up because it’s not very far from, from Seattle that is there is an area in a rugged part of the mountains here.
Yeah, I probably should have pulled it up before the show. There’s a mine here you want to look up, it’s called the Monte Cristo Mine and it was producing significant quantities of gold, but it has a particularly pernicious problem who there’s that big one in that it is up a very steep and rugged canyon prone to flooding at the wildest and craziest times. And so what happened was at the turn of the century, they decided to invest it ton of money, kind of literally and put a lot of rail tracks, narrow gauge up that canyon to, to render the gold out of that mind. By the time they got that thing stabilized because it kept blowing out every time they’d have a big storm, they got it stabilized enough. They found out that basically it was not lucrative to bring the gold out, given the maintenance costs of that railway. And so what ended up happening is kind of like here in California with the high speed railway to nowhere, actually (the towns of) Bakersfield and Merced. But the idea is, you know, you got to put something that expensive in to a place where it can return the investment or you’re basically putting good money after bad.
And that’s what happened in this case of this Gold Mine at the Monte Cristo Mine. So look, that one up is a great historic spot. And, my brother in law has hiked up in those canyons. He says, a really spectacular might even be possible to paint up in that region. You’d have to check the local, regulations and, and a claim rights, but it’d be fun to try anyway.
But there are quite a few really interesting places. I’m not that far from Seattle. You know, this is Redmond right here, home of Microsoft, right? So you know, you’re looking at at here’s a Tolte river placer for gold. Okay, right outside of town. So here’s another one. A typically what you’re looking for these streams you see these river for the purposes of gold prospecting. So there’s “Goldbar placer” primary producer placer, and it’s an occurrence. So again, these, these all kind of go along this same trend.
So that’s it for the kind of the western side having to do mostly with mostly to do with volcanic activity, intrusive, magmatic and and so forth. Now in this north east corner, up a toward Idaho and, and, and Canada, there’s a different kind of volcanic activity that goes on a lot of times in these areas. And that’s Fissure flows wide. Broad ranges were covered with lava flows. They went on for miles and miles, hundreds of miles, and it’s oftentimes underneath those such as in the cap rocks on the mid Sierra Nevada around Columbia and Sonora. You’ll find these lava cap rocks sealed in great treasures of gold and placers from ancient tertiary gravels in this area there likely similar kinds of things. Let’s poke around and see what we can find.
So here we have lead, silver, copper, zinc, gold, antimony. So this one’s producing a bunch of oars are are going to archetype, which would be, would be anything our genta would be silver bearing or Chalcopyrite. Here we go again, Galena lead or, and so we’re and so forth. Pyrites silver sailor, right? And it looks like it has some tetra he dried. So some cool gems that come out of these mines. But you know, it’s pretty amazing. Now when all this, most of these are our mark is having been a historic mines. They’re not active currently. Now some of that can be effected by local, regulations. And some of it’s just how they mark the thing. So it just depends. Here’s the silver king group that produces gold as a primary commodity. Pretty funny name. Silver’s, the last thing on the list. Go figure. He’d give up trying to hide something. So this whole areas of interest and, and so forth. You notice the deserts, are not quite as interesting there. That here’s some gold, probably radioactive (?) as all get out near Hanford go figure. it’d be kind of fun. There’s Pasco and Hanford over here, but yeah, it’s it’s, upstream, so that’s good. It shouldn’t be too “hot.”
Chinaman bar Placer so no telling what kind of level of gold is in that, prospect. But there it is out in the middle of the desert area of eastern Washington, seamless thinking over here. Pomeroy. So anyway, I just thought I’d do a quick journey through Washington state and give you an idea of what you can do with the government gold maps and how you’ve kind of peruse these things. What I like to do, like I said, is I, I’ll take a place, what am I doing that I’m messing up everybody’s vision stop wrong screen. Excuse me. I want to move this map and go, let’s go to Mount Saint Helens again, or let’s go over here to Mount Adams.
When we look at this, we can see gorgeous detail. Let me shut down this little snippet of information and gorgeous detail around the mountain. Let’s see if there’s some minds that show up. Sure. There are over here, not as many as we see in some of the other volcanic areas. That’s kind of interesting in its own right. It makes you wonder, apply. I always wonder why, because I’m looking for a root cause for deposits. That’s what we do when we’re doing the trail and looking and hunting and prospecting for gold.
So, we have copper, silver, and gold. So this one, primary production has copper that’d probably be in the form of Pyrites, but you know, copper again, copper again, but, you know, it’s just interesting and all these guys are all producing mainly copper and they just have some trace amounts of gold. That’s not unusual. I have a mine in the area where I frequent, and it’s the same pattern. It’s mostly for copper, but it has some occurrence. Oh, gold. So they recovered gold from it as a regular output. It was worth it. so here we go.
let’s, let’s go, let’s go further upstate. There’s Mount Baker’s up this way now. Baker happens to be one of the, one of the three rangers and c three sisters, three, three fingers. I saw Monte Cristo Columbia Peak, Monte Cristo peak. It’s probably around the area where that mine is. You can see how rugged it is here, steep canyons and hard to get to, which makes it of interest. it, but it would have to be something really fairly, a fairly productive to be worth it. There’s the town of Monte Cristo Rey it up here,
“Boston American” mine, “Fortunate” mine. So anyway, we can bounce around here forever looking for it. There’s ways to search for it. But this is the Monte Cristo trail. So this is the one I was telling you about right through here and it cuts out, that’s per peak.
So we’re looking do due east of Lake Stevens, Marysville, and Everett Washington, which is right on the Puget sound here. So that’s, that’s the area you want to look at for that. That one particular, mountain (Monte Cristo) I was talking about now, the one I was trying to zoom in on was Mount Baker. And I’m, I’m getting lost chairman Pete Colfax peak and can peak, I know who you’re up here.
Well anyhow, geography of Washington, I’m getting lost… I need a map with the name on it and I have to zoom in on it. So for now, rather than bore you with my ineptitude at finding a mountain in Washington, I was going to tell you, Mount Baker is a very interesting geologic place because it is rated as one of the highest and most volcanoes in the cascade region. so with all this activity goes to this gold with all the activity goes magma and metal intrusions. And frankly these are living volcanoes. They’re not dormant, they’re not dead. They might be sleeping, but they are certainly giants that are, can be awakened in a moment’s notice. Remember Mount Saint Helens and we’ve seen some rumblings. Enter a mountains like Mount Baker, list. So to some degree Mount Rainier, although it’s made some noise of late and Mount Saint Helens is starting to make noise again.
So, you know, go figure. This is an interesting area. I always kind of loved to get into the geologic aspect of this cause that was actually my passion when I first started the geology. I was interested in earthquakes and volcanoes. So I kind of, I kind of get to be a nut on that, but the, the gold comes along for the ride. So I have fun both ways uphill in the volcano.
So that’s it for tonight. I just wanted to bring those things up to you and show you what we had, where is golden Washington state and how you can find it using these maps. It’s really, really interesting. To me what’s fun. Sometimes it’s to layer on, you can put on pictures and images on these things that people have. So you get a good feel for what it looks like and the terrain.
You might see the mine shafts and things like that that are posted. There’s all kinds of ways you can stick that on these, on these maps with Google Earth. So there’s more than just the government gold maps. You can overlay the different layers and get different, you can get topo maps and stick them underneath and that kind of stuff. It’s pretty fun.
Catch you later. That’s it for tonight.
And Good Prospecting.!
Oh, and don’t forget, as we talked about, we have this https://SourdoughMiner.com/GDU/ just go there and check it out. See what you think. there’s a little video there describing what the gold diggers undergrounds all about. It’s how I can spend more time to teach you more about gold prospecting and how we can get together and find more gold.
So catch you then.
Good prospecting and good night Prospector Jess over and out.
