Good evening everybody. This is Prospector Jess from Hunting4Gold.com and SourdoughMiner.com.
I’m here again tonight to talk a little bit more about prospecting and one of the things I wanted to ask you is; “what do you want to know about more of regarding placer and load gold prospecting?” What kind of questions do you have? If you could, ask them below. I’m going to try tonight to see if I can give a little bit of a overview and then I’m going to visit our live stream and let you kind of Ping me with some questions; because it’s time you had some feedback. We’ve been at this live streaming thing doing one every night, sometimes two videos posted, but one of these live every night and the idea is to give you a chance to ask questions and get some feedback. I also want to make sure that you’re aware of, the material that we have going out.
Live stream is repost it to other places. So one of the things I wanted to show you are one of the things I wanted to show you is how we’re doing, which is kind of fun because you guys are really responding and I really love it. I love to be able to interact with the alive and also love to be able to interact with you with these reposts because we’re seeing a real dynamic that we haven’t seen before. A community is forming and it’s really cool. Gold prospectors are some of the neatest people I know. So let’s take a look at this full screen picture I’ve got. so one of the things you’re aware of of course, is that we’re doing live streaming straight into Facebook and that’s where I’m getting this initial feedback and initial response and that’s really cool. We’re also seeing that in addition to that effect, we repost, usually within 24 hours, right onto my Youtube channel, which is the “Prospector Jess” hunting4gold channel.
Actually, it’s Hunting for Gold on the Facebook page and the Prospector Jess Youtube channel which you can subscribe to and get access to.
These videos are posted on Youtube. Last night’s “Stream flow and Placer Gold” is already up to 81 views. It was posted this afternoon. So it’s booking.
We have quite a few others that are doing athe same Facebook post has reached 4,588 people with 277 people engaging. It’s just awesome guys. Thanks. I appreciate it. So along that line I wanted to kind of go into tonight’s show and have a chance for us to look at the, the, material. how many of you have seen this video? This is really what moves gold and I wanted to show that to you because it’s just an amazing picture. If you look in the background here, you see it looks almost like smoke, not just water but like dust and everything else is flying up from this thing because the flood is exploding through the trees and the shrubbery and just tearing it out, which means it’s tearing the boulders that are connected to the roots and they’re going downstream underneath this what looks like cement, you know, red cement moving downstream.
That’s what moves gold. That’s what we’ve been talking about all week. So keep that in mind as you’re looking at gold prospects. When you see things that are ripped up like this, start thinking, okay, how heavy was the flow? And Oh, by the way, how wide was it? And somewhere underneath here is the little summer stream that you see, and you’re not interested in that. You’re interested in this thing (the high flow) because notice where those big logs are going. That’s where it’s going to be depositing the gold stuff. And that’s what’s important to keep track of. So that’s what we’ve been about.
So tonight we should have a live stream posted on the, on the, page normally, you know, do something like this because all manner of feedback problems, but you know, it’d be fun trying. Hey, there we are. Look at that. We got 24 people on. Hey, great job guys! Thanks for joining us. And notice I can see on this picture, the picture was posting just a second ago showing you all that flooding. And then I started hunting for where we’re going now. So this is fun. I’m so, what we want to do right now is kind of open the panel up, open our discussion, and you guys give me some questions down below and I’ll just start responding with what you got and you’ve got people a Marion R. says “Hi.” Do you have have a question? Okay, so let us have it. Matthew R says, “I’m ready to go hunting.”
All right, so we’re good to go… What I’d like you to guys to think about is, if you’re going to go hunting for gold, where, what type of gold are you hunting? You know, I noticed that we have people from West Virginia, we have people from Alaska, we have people from Oregon, Arizona. We’ve had people from Montana.
So let’s have a chime in. Okay, so Matthew says “Hi all.” All right. And so, you know, that’s a picture of what we want to do, but I want to make sure that we have a chance to get everybody to start chiming in and giving me some questions. So this is an opportunity to get some feedback. I thought we’d do these from time to time, not necessarily every night. because it usually takes a little prep to answer some of these questions, but I’m open for some off the cuff discussion. It’s great. It’s good to see you guys!
So, right now we’re reaching 822 people. Thirty two people have engaged already. So now we’re starting now or starting to cook. We’ve got people liking and all kinds of good stuff.
Have you been in Utah? Yes, I’ve been in Utah. I have not prospected in Utah. Not any particular reason why not, except that. I just haven’t done any there. So it’s a great place. There is gold in Utah. It’s a little funny in how it places and where you find it, but people find it. it’s not, you know like California, I’m in California and you kind of find it by tripping over it practically, but if it weren’t for the laws, but that’s a whole-nuther can of worms. I’d like not go there tonight. we can open that up on a special night for legal issues and the like. “Prospecting in South Carolina” says Marion road, Nick Mckenzie is saying, “K.” Okay. And Marion road says prospecting in South Carolina. So, so we have quite a bit of interest in South Carolina.
“How long have I been prospecting?” Well, let’s see. I started at age, I was about 14 or 12 years old, somewhere in there. But the place where I came back into it is kind of interesting and that was in ’96 or ’98. I went on a family vacation with my kids as opposed to being a kid on a trip and I took the kids back to where I went when I was a kid back up to Columbia, California to a gold prospecting state park that’s dedicated to the gold prospector or 1849’er. It’s a Great place to go on vacation. There’s steam engines, you know, during the summer time they have, when they’re open and they have things going, they have a live black-smithing and horses and gamblers and you name it. It is fun! Get your own Sarsaparilla. I remember that. That was fun. So, but in Colombia they had some of the richest gold ever found in California. And in the process they’ve dedicated that segment of the state to be kind of a state park that’s in honor of 1849’er. It’s really cool.
So doing that, I got the kids a trip to go learn to prospect and pan for gold and to find some gold. Well we found some. So that started gold fever amongst the young boys. Girls got interested too, but the boys really got gold fever and so we got invited to go the next day to a guy named Joshua Vic had a prospecting training camp down on Wood’s creek. And so we went down to Wood’s creek and we panned and we dug and we riffled for about a good eight hours, and had a blast. And at that point it was locked in solid and so then the rest of the year was spent building sluice boxes and getting gold pans and more hammers and what-not.
And it wasn’t until a few years later, we actually went up and got her own prospect and got going with dredging and in a high banking and sluicing and all kinds of, all manner of geology, which I had in my background back in the old days. So that’s Kinda how I got started. So I’ve been going for quite a while. See more about my prospecting story in this video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-IZXVw5jr4
if half the stream is fast moving water says Bob S, and the other side is slow because of bedrock. “Will go fall out on the edge between the fast and the slow water?”
When the water reduces speed, the gold starts to drop immediately. Now why is it the reduction in speed? Because anything faster is going to keep going. But anything slowed down is going to start parking gold, larger particles and nuggets first, down to the fine stuff, which may, if there’s any flow at all and may continue to go on down stream because it almost floats.
So what happens when you get this kind of situation is it depends on whether there’s a curve or straight section and I go into that in great length in the 20-20 prospecting report. I talk about more in “helical flow,” but the principles are the same and that is hydrodynamics drives the gold to be swept one side or the other of the stream bed or down the middle. And in so doing, you kind of have to know that during the high flow, NOT low flow, high flow to know where the gold is going to concentrate out because it may very well be that the beach that you’re sitting on is where the gold actually is parked. And it’s down three or four feet toward bedrock. So keep that in mind. Next time you look.
What are the odds Brian Brown says, what are the odds of us ever getting to dredge again in California rivers? That’s a really good question. I would have expected this thing to have been resolved within a year three, and here it’s going on a decade. So this is kind of silly. What we need to be about is making darn sure that those who were headed to the Supreme Court get our support because that’s the only thing that can break this open or possibly some ninth circuit court changes. Right now what you have is an overwhelming majority of court and, and legal representatives in the state of California who have basically made a statement that they only support people who pay a lot of money in re-election campaign funds for causes such as, conservation and so forth. Causes such as diversity of the, of the ecosystem (green new deal?) and that leaves everybody else out. And, and when you look at it closely, it leaves everybody in the economy out, you know, ranchers, food processors, anybody who builds a building, material, or uses rocks.
Anybody who builds anything. Anybody who, who basically uses energy. So, you know, pretty soon you’re back to caveman-days. But, that is a part of the social-economic agenda here. And, and I don’t want to get into the whole thing of that, but it is definitely quite obvious based on the performance of what they do. Now here’s one “gold don’t float, lol.” Yes, gold does float. If you have very fine flour, gold, and you get your fingertips with sunscreen oil, or do you get your pan with oil in it by, you know, the plastics, they use a plasticizer material. They use a oil material to eject the pan out of the mold, so they actually coat the mold with a silicone oil. And when you get these pans, when they’re new, they’re coated with that oil. You got to scrub this thing with, with a wool brush, you know, steel or copper wool and some soap dish detergent and get all of that oily surface off.
Make it as though a finishes. You can, if you look at this thing, is used to be shiny as could be right through here, and now it’s a dull spot. There is an even duller spot over here which is by design. And then there’s the riffles. But the idea is you want to basically get rid of all that because it will make flour, gold float. All it takes. Is it a small bubble of oil, which you can’t even microscopic and a microscopic piece of gold, and you stick oil onto it, it’ll spread out over the surface and now the gold has a buoyancy roughly even with that of water, and it’ll just float downstream until the water completely settles out and that gold will be left on the top. That’s why you see a lot of flour, gold deposits on sandbars and not in the rocks and cobbles down at the bottom. Okay, so thanks.
Let’s see what else we have here. We got “looking to purchase a blue bowl” set up sooner. I’d bring mine out and show it to you. I use the Blue Bowl. it’s a little tricky to set up. The key to blue-bowl success is the speed of the swirling. Take it right to the lip and just about over. And then what you want to do is make sure that you, that you basically, again clean it out with detergent because you’re working with small gold. And the other thing you want to do is make sure that when you have it, I would I would opt to buy the extra levelers that go on the bucket and level that thing with a bubble level because you want that whole lip even, you really don’t need a bowl level because if you level it so that it’s going evenly, it’ll start dripping from all sides evenly, but the idea is you want to make that thing run as smoothly and evenly as you can and as fast because that drives the black sands out and keeps the gold down.
Now, if your gold is really, really fine, you may have to throttle it back because fine gold has a property when we talked about it earlier, it’s very close to (effect of having the same) density as water and so what’s going to happen is the fine gold is going to start getting scooted along partly because it acts like little air foils. It’ll start getting tripped into the rest of the flow of the black sands and it’ll go right on out in here into your bucket. Same problem occurs if you’re dredging or if you’re high banking or if you’re using a sluice box. If you’re running too fast and you got lots of fine gold, slow it down, get that black sands to start building up on the riffles so that it goes not more than half the way across your your riffle gap, but about halfway and that will ensure that you’re trapping the fine stuff.
If you go to where you’re only seeing pebbles in there, guess where the stuff went out the back. So that’s another tip. Let’s see. Laurie says “she has a placer claim in the Black Hills. They’ve been trying to hit bedrock for eight years, still haven’t succeeded, always hit water and have to swim. Lol. This is our year on that claim.” So there you go. You just got to keep going. The other thing you might do is, is try a finding some place where the bedrock protrudes and get an idea of the slope of the rock. They call it, they call it a strike to. You’re looking to see if there’s a diving rock slope. You can kind of get an idea of the angle and that’ll give you some feel for how deep you’re going to have to dig to get to bedrock where you are, other points, you know, if there’s jagged blocks down below, which there are and where I, where I do a lot of prospecting, it’s all serpentine and that stuff just breaks up and big blocks so you can have a boulder the size of the house down below you and you wouldn’t even know it. And the gold will go all the way around it and find someplace underneath the stick so you have to just kind of know that. And so that’s, that’s an important thing.
So. Okay. Any more questions? This is great guys. Thanks for the feedback!
Do I have a video available? Good question. Yes. We have videos of virtually every report we have has a video associated with it. You can find more at https://SourdoughMiner.com/products/ That really is kind of how the reports came to be in the first place. I’m much better at this hand waving thing, you know, as people have said, “if my hands were tied behind my back, I couldn’t speak.” So I like to talk and, and you know, I’m a, I’m a visual kind of person in terms of learning and so I tend to make things like slopes and riffles and stuff like that. I tend to gesture a lot and that works well on video, so that’s what I do as my number one product type, but as a, as an adjunct to that, I do give out the reports that are related to the videos and in part that’s so that you can get going quicker and cheaper.
It’s much easier to produce. But yes, we have videos and we have DVD’s, so we have video, web material and we also have DVD’s if you want to check it in the player. We’re seeing a of recent that not as many people are interested in the dvds as once were. We also have whole video sets that you can get whole DVD sets. And so, if you look under products on the sourdough minor page, we’re on hunting for gold. You can find the access to those offerings. Feel free to peruse to your heart’s content and ask any questions you want to about that. That’s a good question. can GPA claims? Yes. GPAA claims, yes or no? yes I have done not GPA, but it is GPAA, Gold Prospectors, Association of America and I have been a member and I’ve used their claims.
There are a lot of it okay. Claims and then there’s some really good ones. you know, obviously the last Dutchman, a loud mine in Arizona comes to mind and then there’s another really good one up right outside of Columbia. I’m Italian bar. And so, that’s a really good place to go hang out and some good gold comes out of that hole. there’s actually a lot of holes in that area. Yankee Hill, and you know, if you look at the history of the area, it is loaded with gold. The airport sits on an area that once had had a bowls that were bored by the way the water flow went, ancient waterflow went and down in those bowls, the prospectors found nuggets, big nuggets. And, and that’s how they knew there was a lot of gold in the region. One of the biggest chunks of gold came out of a, out of an area north of there toward angel’s camp and one of the biggest chunks of recent history came out in [inaudible] 96 98, Christmas Eve nugget and it’s at the Iron stone winery near Arnold California.
Look it up. Gorgeous. The piece that they have remaining is like 60 something pounds of crystalline gold. It’s really precious stuff all in one piece, but it was 300 pounds of gold that they blast it out on the very last night that they could operate legally. They were losing their license and decided to let the claim go. So they did one more blast and then they found the biggest amount of gold they ever found out of the Harvard Mine right near Jamestown. So those are worth looking up to see what you can find, but it’s fun.
William Nobel says “I’m in Indiana and this year me and a friend are going to start looking in the creeks with high banker in good tips for semi flat areas.” Okay. Well, Indiana is going to be an interesting problem in its own right because a lot of the, a lot of that area has some find a core scold, not much heavier than that. So keep yourself dialed in for the fine gold because there is good flour, gold in the area, especially anywhere in that area where there’s been glacial till there’s no gold everywhere, but it’s very, very fine stuff. So again, you’re gonna have to dial down your high banker and dredge. You’re going to have to dial down your sluice box to capture that gold. Maybe run a Long Tom to, you know, add an extra length to the sluice. There’s some new gold mattings that are really cool that use a various types of helical flow or they call it a gold helix. Kind of structures and things like that to capture more fine gold. But there’s some neat things. There is a miracle matting by, by the Keene family. They have a really nice matting that has various types and sizes to adapt to these finer flows while still trapping some of the bigger nuggets. Oh, and good old fashioned vinyl “miners moss” works well too.
Lois says, “I’m talking in South Dakota. All of our mining activities take place.” Okay. So that’s where, that’s where lowest does all their stuff is in South Dakota. And South Dakota has a history of really good gold buying, especially along the beaches up there outside of rapid city. You go up into the mountains there, there’s a whole a lead. And in that area there’s the old homestead. It’s actually not that old, like it closed in the late eighties, you know, home state gold mine probably worth opening again. They’re, they’re entertaining the thoughts, but it always kind of becomes a big question of whether they can get over the hurdles that had been put in place to prevent them from starting up. But that place has produced a tremendous amount of gold. A particularly particular using the heap leach cyanide method, from micro fine crystals in, in various metamorphic rocks.
And, and, in fact, let’s see, I don’t have it here. but let’s see. Nope, I don’t have it here. I’m going to do, but it’s probably hidden. I’ll bring it up another time, but when we talk about rocks and stuff, I’ll show you some of the drill samples that came out of the Homestake in South Dakota. I’m okay. Deadwood, yes. Deadwood. So a deadwood area. And I had a cousin who was north of there at a spear fish, so down to spearfish canyon. Gorgeous country. Oh Man. Spectacular views and spectacular gold. and of course I gave rise some of that gold, gave rise to los with copper and other things, is in addition to the natural native alloys that were forming in that area that give rise to black hills gold, which has all kinds of colors from rose to green to two brilliant. Orange to yellow to white, you know. And so they make some fantastic jewelry with that. So for right now, let’s call it a night.
And like I said, you can subscribe over here on, on Prospector Jess channel, on Youtube, and, you know, you can see all my good stuff over there right here. Also see https://Sourdoughminer.com/products/ for the other stuff I mentioned. There’s a bunch of videos and reports over there to take a look at. Especially if you get bored or it’s rainy day and you’re not out prospecting like you should be 😉
So Prospector Jess, over and out. Have a good night and good prospecting.
We’ll see you tomorrow.