OK here's the recount of my mining in an old hydraulic pit last summer. Even though the New 49'ers club motto is "miners helping miners", I am not going to reveal the location I was working. This is not because I am hoarding it to myself, anyone else can work there that finds it. I would personally like to see more members out on the claims prospecting for good places. There are a lot of claims that go untouched for years at a time, this place I worked was one of them.
We have to remember that many claims were used mainly for suction dredging, so many members don't even think of them for mining out of the water. In any event although this claim is very accessible, people just don't even think to try it out to see if there is anything worth working for. I was at first looking at this section of the claim for nugget shooting. I didn't find anything with the detector except the usual square nails, boot tacks and lead shot.
But what caught my eye was that in many places in the hydraulic pit there was a lot of ancient bedrock, some of it quite high since this was the bottom of the river at one time. As I looked over this situation I saw many cracks and crevices. So I though this might just be a good place to crevice.
I came back with a whole pile of crevice tools, most of which are home made, chisels, hammers and my gas vac.
Of course because I am basically lazy I concentrated on cracks and crevices that could be easily scraped out. The exposed bedrock was not very extensive so it was not long before I had worked it to where the only method left was the hammer and chisel the larger cracks open. This was hard work and it got really hot on those rocks once it hit ten o'clock in the morning, so I usually quit about that time.
This kind of mining takes a lot of time, it is not for the faint-earthed or those not willing to work hard for their gold. I even pried apart some impressive slabs of bedrock with a six foot bar and even at times a hydraulic jack. Some of the slabs I couldn't move out of the way by lifting so I had to just pry them aside with a long bar.
There is no water to be had close by so I simply dry classified what came out of the cracks and ran the remainder through LeTrap sluice in a small creek on another day. So, all in all it was hard work, but I could see with every clean-up that I was getting good enough gold to keep working and keep me interested. I will say that I didn't get rich doing this, but did get what I consider good gold for my efforts.
If club members would just get out on their own or with a friend and do some real looking around on claims that have been neglected by many, they might just be rewarded with a golden surprise.
So, with that said, I will post a picture of some results I got last summer doing this.
