So good evening everybody.
We’re going to talk about what rocks show gold lode? Or put another way, “What do rocks show you about where you can find gold lode?”
What you’re looking at here is a specimen, a very large specimen. We’re talking something about this big, of gold lode. This is a specimen that has some Chalcopyrite and it has some really intense amounts of gold in it, so much so that it’s quite heavy itself. And where it’s cut, you can see that kind of goldish shine to it. That, area is actually metallic metalliferous. It doesn’t chip away like it would if it were a pyrite. It’s smears the gold. And so when you see something like that in a lode, we’re in some kind of rock object. You, you know, you’re onto the payload, you’re not, you’re heading down the page streak in that lode and you’re looking at essentially what amounts to precipitation of “metalliferous” material.
And, that’s kind of the ultimate thing you’re looking for.
Now, what brings up tonight’s topic? Well, Len brought up a question on our, on our interaction on Facebook about how he would know when he was looking at something like what we had on the cover. You know, you’re out in the desert in the pliers and open basins. How am I going to tell gold lode from that situation? How do I trace it? In water I discussed that in the placer deposits. You can see where the placer Gold peters out, and then you turn right angles and go uphill upstream from there.
But out here in the desert, how would you do it? Well, fundamentally it’s the same problem. You’re going to go uphill upstream, but there’s no stream here. But there are other things you can do here that are important and that is if you look at this picture, you’ll see there’s these rounded, you know, sandstone looking materials that are all, you know, crushed and burnished.
Who knows what the material is, reddish, it’s aged quite a bit and oxidized. There’s a lot of sand down in there. And if you go down below, you’ll see this probably rocks and cobbles and some of the river beds that are around in this desert region.
But what you’re really looking for are the minerals. It’s what the Rock’s tell you. That tells you where the goal lode is. And this is true. I mean, one of the things I suggested to him, he was looking forward to know; can you use detectors to find gold lode? Yes, you can use metal detectors in this circumstance quite effectively because you have a very nice wide area. You can just work. But you still need to know a little bit about how the water flows when it floods. And you also need to know what you’re looking at in the way of rocks and minerals.
The rocks and minerals tell a tale. That tail usually is in the form of the kinds of oxides and the kinds of sulfides that go along with the kind of mineral you’re looking for. If it’s platinum or if it’s gold or you name it silver, lead, you’ll see galena. Okay. But you won’t find galena and what you’ll, I mean you’ll find galena and you’ll find sulfides because the lead, you know, and the silver that are with the galena, we’ll kind of come out and, and the, the galena itself will begin to corrode and do its thing in when it’s exposed to this kind of desert environment. And so what you going to be looking for are oftentimes the, the precipitates of other salts that come from the metallic lode itself deteriorating. In the case of a deposit of Pyrites, it’ll actually deteriorate and form sulfuric acid for example.
And that sulfuric acid can etch the lode, literally eat away at the quartz that holds the lode and it’ll eventually deteriorate into a nice little pile. And then over time that will get covered up. Like this Playa we see here with sand and whatever, and all you’ll see left is a little tiny dimple what’s called a swale. And that little tiny dimple can be the only existing appearance other than possibly detecting the sulfides. That’s the hint, the sulfide residues that are other rocks and other things that have eroded from that material being in the environment around the gold.
In the bottom of that dimple because remember ate away all the quartz and the quartz disappeared. What’s left is gold it can be a nice handy little bucket. I had a good friend who had found one of these little swales with a detector, went into it and they dug for a good chunk of a day and came to the bottom and came out with about a homer bucket full of gold.
Not Too often you find a pocket placer like that, but that is something you want to keep your eyes open for. A little swale. It’s a dimple in the topography. Okay. The topology if you will. And, and so what you’re looking for is this, this pattern of a dimple or a dent in the side of what would normally be a flat surface. Maybe inclined slightly, but there’s no reason to explain the dent. You know, it’s not, it’s not like water eroding through that usually forms a groove. This is like is though the water actually eroded it in place and eat into the earth and then the earth collapsed in on itself. The only thing that would do that is if there was something in that area that actually with the application of moisture at the water table essentially would eventually leach out (the quartz) and leave a hole behind and that would collapse inward somewhat like you see with a lot of these sinkholes.
Okay. so it’s going to form a small sink hole, but at the bottom of that sinkhole is a treasure for you to dig out. So that’s the idea. And that’s what I wanted to bring up tonight was, you know, you get it, you need to know the associated materials that go with your gold door. So what is it you’re looking for?
How to detect those in, in, in this area. You know, what cobbles are coming out of this hole for sampling, or if we’re looking at the picture we had with the gold door and we say, okay, what, what other stuff is in there? Well, there’s this nice bright shiny stuff is gold. But notice the grayish looking background stuff that’s not gold, that’s a particular material. That material will probably be found in much larger quantities in the region. You know, for example, quartz float, but you’re not looking for just any quartz float because white quartz float typically with a little bit of rust is what we would call leverrite, Leave-er-Right-There.
But if it’s a really deeply blackened or orange-y stained quartz, or it may be a little bluish. You know, that starts looking an awful lot like a tertiary quartz gravel or, or if it’s a lode, a chunk of tertiary quartz that has some or stuck in it. And at that point you need to take a metal detector over it and see if it rings. If it does, now you’ve got something worth, taken apart, either crushing or possibly etching with some acid over your own so that you can get, because if it’s got nice crystals of quartz crystals of gold in it, it’ll make some great specimen quality it can fetch two to three times gold spot price.
If it’s big enough, two to three times the current price of gold on the market today, it’s running about $1,350 bucks an ounce. It’s going up. By the way, in case nobody’s noticed.
There’s some speculation that is going to hit $1500 by the end of the year. I don’t know about that. People have speculated that one since it got up to $2000 and then kind of ricocheted downward. But you know, it really hasn’t gone below a thousand. So there’s no reason why I wouldn’t go to $1500. And if you look at it and compare it historically with other times where gold has been under pressure, $2000 is not outrageous for the price of gold. So if it’s going for two x spot, that’s a lot of money. Okay. You know, for a specimen quality chunk.
So that’s just another nugget for you for tonight.
Good prospecting, Prospector Jess, over and out. I’ll see ya on the next video.