Jeep at Overland Expo

This last weekend we visited the 2013 Overland Expo at Mormon Lake just outside of Flagstaff, AZ. Besides being gold prospectors we’re also outdoor and survival enthusiasts and this gave us the opportunity to see some cool new gear, meet some cool people and have some fun.

A couple of the items on our list were solar power, a good 4X4 trailer and a rugged RV, we got our monies worth and did not spend a dime. As we walked around and chatted my girlfriend and daughter both mentioned how quiet I was. Indeed, the gears were turning. Can I fabricate that, can I really use this? You know the how it goes. While I saw a lot of stuff that is great for being outdoors aside from the motorcycles, Jeeps and standard 4×4 trucks most of the heavy duty 4x4s simply are too large to get deep where the gold is. The good news is that they can get you close, and in style. They can also keep you comfortable on long hauls if you want to see the country or world.

One local, AZ based company whose products got our interest was Adventure Trailers from Prescott, AZ. We really liked their Chaser models and the rep, Clint was a cool guy and took time to answer all our our questions and invite us up to the shop. Clint wore a cool kilt and when I searched for “cammo kilt” TheGrommet.com was the result, specifically this page and the video is hilarious! Think I’ll buy a UtiliKilt too and go do some gold mining in it. Hell, I’ll even post some pics. Have to admit that I can’t stand the boring advertising most gold equipment and metal detector dealers use, it just so fuddy-duddy and not even close to being effective like this.

The solar power items were in real interest to us and the guys at Goal Zero offered us some great show deals. One guy recognized me, made this old country boy feel good. Below is the funny utiliKilt video and a gallery (below the video) of Overland Expo 2013 Flagstaff, Arizona photos. Gotta click the pics twice to enlarge, it will change pages as you do this.

Arizona Drywahing

Knowing the heat is well on its way a few buddies and I decided to get in some dry washing. If you’re not familiar with the process of drywashing it can seem a bit odd.

Several factors can influence your approach, two of the main ones are: the area you are in and how much gold the overburden is carrying.

The areas we wee in had little gold in the overburden. Most of it was right on the bedrock and the final few inches of black sands covering the bedrock.

The bedrock is a variable in depth, from being exposed right down to several feet in depth in the dips.

This means you have to shovel and rake out all of the overburden and get the bedrock prepped for vacuuming. Some folks like electric drywashers I prefer gas for portability.  Let’s face it some of the best gold is too far to hike a generator to.

When the overburden is removed you have the option of running a metal detector to find any gold nuggets before you began the vac work. We used my Fisher Gold Bug 2 and Laszlo’s Tesoro but I can’t remember the model.

Once you have all the material vacuumed up then its time to run it through the drywasher. Some people like to pre-screen the material or classify it others just shovel or put it right in. There is no one right or wrong way, it all depends on the area.

There are also many kinds of drywashers, electrics, hand-cranks, puffers, blower operated and gas vacuum operated. The one at left my buddy Laszlo is using is an hand-crank bellows style. Old fashioned technology that really works well. I’m a bit modern with my gas powered Keene 140. Both work equally effectively, the main this is to have fun, which we do.

At the end of the day we had some nice nuggets and several grams of good fine gold. Our buddy Adam came along too but my camera battery was out of juice by them.

Gold Hunt

My buddy Laszlo and I got out this weekend for a hunt. We scored some nice nuggets and some good fine gold, it was lots of fun. The bottom two nuggets are mine, the top Las’s.

I’ve had people ask me in the past how I determine profit from a hunt. Well, hanging out with my buddies is priceless but I’ll share the economics of the hunt. On a fun hunt we’re not dealing with the same costs as a commercial placer operation but we still want to understand the economics of it all.

I needed to fill my 4×4 truck with gas that totaled $23.00. I have an 18 gallon tank and used a 1/4 tank there and back, so that’s 4.5 gallons of gas at $3.86 per gallon so that’s $17.37 in gas costs.

Next, I replaced the batteries in my Fisher Gold Bug 2, that was $5.44 in operating costs.

I already had food and water but I can price out what I used. 3 gallons of water at $0.89 per gallon equals $2.67, one banana $0.50 and a few snack bars purchased in bulk totaling $1.50, so . I always factor truck maintenance costs at $20.00 per trip even if nothing goes wrong, just best that way for my purposes.

Gold Tequlia

Now the gold. Gold price is currently $1,587.00. I found 2.3 grams of gold nuggets and .09 gram of fine gold sampling, that gives me a total of $117.74 in nuggets and $46.07 in fine gold for a grand total of $163.81. The formula I use is 31 grams in an ounce and gram price by tenths. Not quite wages but OK when after expenses I found $116.33 in gold. Las’s take was very similar, just different by a few tenths of a gram. By the way our sombreros and Jose Cuervo did not get figured into the costs either ;)

So let’s see the final math here:

Costs of Gold Mining

Hope you enjoyed!

Blue Monster Wash

Introduction: This is an article from our “old style” site written by Mike Champion. I thought you might enjoy it here too. ”Have fun and take pictures, okay?” That’s my wife. I’m just finishing packing up my car, a Land Rover. The chariot of the free-spirited, the stagecoach of the 21st century. Leaving had originally been my wife’s idea. She’s your typical skydiving, fast driving, run-with-the-bulls adventurer, while I admit I am a little more… discerning in what I consider exciting. It’s not that I don’t want to get crazy, see the world and make memories that most people only dream about, I just never have. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, we decided together, and as I’ve been desperate to let loose my wanderlust for some time, she simply asked me, “if you could go one place, do one thing, all by yourself, what would it be? Which adventure would you choose?” That was easy. I’ve long been infatuated with the Wild West mythos… cowboys and Indians, frontier justice, panning for gold, making your fortune against all odds. Maybe that’s why it’s been so tough to free my inner adventurer… it feels like all the good adventures have already happened. Two seconds of research changed that. “If you want it,” my wife said, “it’s yours.” And she was right: there’s still gold in them thar hills, and there’s nothing in my way. Prospecting, just like the 49ers and gold barons of America’s past.

Have fun and take pictures, she says. I smile as I get into the car. “I’m coming back a millionaire.”

After driving ten hours over a two day span, I arrived in what my research told me was the best place to start. I wanted the real adventure, and this was no man’s land and true Old West country– Yuma county, Arizona. I planned on spending every night in the field; no hotels and running water for this prospector! I had packed a one-man pup tent, a sleeping bag, a small gas-burning stove, cans of food and some fresh root vegetables, clothes, and of course my prospecting gear: a shovel and panning bowl, a sluicing trough and water bucket, work gloves and heavy-duty rock pick, a magnifying glass, a flashlight, a pair of non-magnetic tweezers, and a metal detector. Playing the part perfectly, I followed my map into the mountains and desert until I found the village of Bouse. I hopped into a small bar and casually sparked a conversation with the bartender, eager to get some real first hand information. He initially raised his brow at my Midwestern accent. “I’m here looking for gold,” I confessed matter-of-factly. He smiled at my honesty. “Let me mark your map for you,” he said as he explained where a few nearby mines were located. “Best of luck to you.”

I started by spending my first two nights at the feet of the White Tank Mountains, west of Phoenix. There were several small mines scattered about, and I quickly learned the value of a cool, moist cave as an escape from the patient and searching Arizona sun. The mines yielded no lode, or “rock”, gold, but I didn’t come to the White Tanks to find lodestone; I went for the river wash. The waters in and around the caves were said to still over up placer, or “panning”, gold. In the first pan of silt I gathered up, I patiently swirled and swished, hoping for that crimson-white glitter to stare back at me. A brief flash caught my eye; I pulled my tweezers out of my pocket, fumbling so excitedly that they landed with a splash in my pan. With some agitation I once again found that glitter, and with the tweezers pulled out a single flake, dull and dark yellow with flecks of brilliance peppered throughout. Gold! I had actually found gold! I had pulled minerals from the earth by the sweat of my brow, just like the miners whose adventures suddenly seemed so real! For two days I knelt, I sifted, I flushed and I watched… and found that my initial success was less emblematic of that pioneer experience than the frustration, exasperation and bruised ego that followed it. It’s hard to explain, but even though the White Tanks didn’t yield more than a few golden flakes, I couldn’t help loving it. There was something to the tactile sensation of holding the pan, crouching alone away from the world, and finding value amidst chaos that was alluring and rewarding. I wanted more.

I packed up my gear and made my way back to Bouse. Around Bouse were a few old mines that the bartender said might still pack a little punch. As I was setting up camp at the end of the third day, sundown was approaching, and from a nearby cave I heard an eerie sound, an insistent and scratchy choir of screeches echoing out into the dusk. In a flap and flutter, all of a sudden the earth belched out a swirling flame of leathery wings, a mass of bats moving off into the night to hunt. It was breathtaking, and I sat watching them until each one disappeared from view. Beauty aside, I made sure all my tent flaps were securely zippered before bedding down.

I spent the better part of a week with pick in hand, hacking away inside the mines at the slightest reflection of my flashlight. And a different kind of fools gold it was, for sure: in every mine, I found at least some stone embedded with small but visible gold flakes– there for the taking. Happy as a poet on payday, I decided to spend four days gathering stones rather than processing them. Processing was easy enough with the pan, and it didn’t seem to matter: everywhere I looked, there were gold flakes winking back at me. As my first week drew to a close, I realized the error of my ways too late. The gold flakes weren’t embedded in clay, sediment, silt or rivers, nor were they nice, solid lodestones. The gold flakes in this area were all confined to dark red rocks (“rhyolite”, the bartender would tell me the next day). It was too hard to pan, too stable to sluice, and wouldn’t let go of the gold no matter how small you smashed it. Fool’s gold it was indeed: perfectly valuable and perfectly worthless all at once, only a fool would waste any more time on it.

The next day I headed into town, had myself a nice hot meal in condolence of my lost efforts, and went north to Bill Williams River. I practiced my sluicing in that area to positive results for three days. I developed a sixth sense for the tumble of the gravel, the pace of the water, and the knack for shoveling good silt. When taking a break, I tried my luck along the riverside with the metal detector. I thought it was a secret boon, with how much noise it started barking out immediately. With my shovel’s help, I discovered that I was detecting not gold, but the remnants of untold adventurers’ past: a few old coins, bottle caps (a couple from beverages I had never heard of), a belt buckle, two forks and a knife, a cracked metal gold pan, even a mysteriously out of place railroad spike. It was a museum of visitors I would never meet, and the intrigue they represented forgave the frustration of the metal detector’s uselessness to me. I netted more flakes of gold, even one that was paper thin but about the size of my thumbnail. I headed back to Bouse and to the bartender, to get more suggestions for locations. I only had four days left, and one of them was for travel, so I had to continue my adventure as soon as possible. The bartender suggested I travel past Quartzite and cross the border into California. He informed me that there were lots of old abandoned mining camps out there, and I might as well try my luck there as anywhere else. I thanked him, and went on my way.

A few miles south of Quartzite I got a hunch that if I could remember how to get back, I should just find some dirt road and see where it led me. I did, and as nightfall settled I came upon the eerie site of a long abandoned camp. With wrecks from both wooden and metal sluices, and slightly more modern construction on some buildings than others, it looked like the camp had had patrons for the better part of 100 years, but the decay, silence and distance from anything living suggested that Quartzite, and the world, had likely forgotten this place decades ago. Excited, I promptly set up shop and hit the hay, eager for the next morning.

The camp was every legend I loved come to decrepit life. In one of the buildings there was a crude pulverizing machine, and a system of sluices attached to it. In another building there rows of bunks, a couple with foot lockers still next to them, with moldy mattresses and rickety frames half falling all over each other. Another building, the roof buckling but not caving, seemed to be a mess hall, with piles of old and broken hand tools clumped up in the corners. It was a truly fascinating sight. I didn’t dare go near the pulverizer itself, but I didn’t need to; there was a heaping mound of man-made gravel still awaiting the sluice after fifty years. I found to my amazement that the well water still pumped just fine, and I started filling my bucket and running the ancient sluice. If I could have spent a year there, I would have. For three days I drank in the history and mystery around me, concocting stories in my head about the men who used to work, live and die here. I processed the gravel, and found why they probably left; the gold was no longer plentiful enough to be worth mining. I gathered perhaps a pinch of gold flakes while there. I will never forget that place, and I hope someday to take my wife to there. But leave I had to, and it was with a heavy heart and the thrill of discovery that I loaded up my car.

Later, I would find out that the gold I had found was worth maybe $40 total; some of it had actually been copper. I didn’t sell it. I put it in a small plastic bag, and I take it out to look at it every once in a while. My wife and I have gone of several trips together, and though when we first met I promised her she’d sooner lobotomize me than get me in an airplane, we’ve done a couple jumps together now. But every adventure I’ve had goes back to that first one. Without that, none of it would have happened. I still remember the first thing my wife said when I got home. “Are you a millionaire?”

“No,” I smiled, “but I sure found what I was looking for.”

Greenhorn Flats

Introduction: This is an article from our “old style” site written by Mike Champion. I thought you might enjoy it here too.  A little over one hundred years ago, a grim procession of tired and dirty men (and a few courageous women) lined up in the northern frontier to climb treacherous stairs carved in ice. The steps led up the steep mountains of Alaska’s Coast range, amidst glacier clad peaks, to the crest of Chilkoot pass. Each person, carrying a heavy fifty-pound pack, would repeat the climb at least forty more times. The numerous trips were required because at the top of the pass is the Canadian border, and there the Royal Canadian Mounted Police required each person entering the Yukon to posses at least one year’s worth of food and other goods before they could pass into the interior. Only one thing could have convinced one hundred thousand men and women to leave the comfort and security of civilization and venture across the globe to a land hardly explored, a land as wild and forbidding as any on earth. That one thing, of course, was gold!

The miners’ story actually starts a few years earlier, on the Seventeenth of August, 1896. That’s when George Carmacks and his Native American brothers-in-law, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie, discovered a thumb sized nugget of gold while resting at Rabbit Creek, a minor tributary of the Klondike River, itself a tributary to the mighty Yukon. Claims were staked, and the news soon spread among the hundred or so prospectors scattered up and down the Yukon. Meanwhile, the United States and much of the rest of the world was locked in a deep depression. This was before the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and paper money as we know it did not exist. The currency was gold; but the supply of gold had hardly increased in the previous fifty years, while the population had quadrupled. Prices and wages had fallen, in many cases simply because there wasn’t enough money available to exchange goods.

Those who had money often didn’t spend it, because in those desperate times gold became more valuable every day. No word of the strike left the Yukon in 1896. It would take some time to realize how substantial the strike was, and in any case no serious mining could begin until the ground froze. Only then would it be possible to dig a dry hole in the swampy creek bottom. All through the dark, sub-arctic winter, in temperatures as low as -60 degrees, the miners dug on, suspecting to hit pay dirt from bedrock along the creek. It was a brutal time, and those miners suffered serious deprivations. It’s ironic, because they were finding more gold then they could ever imagine, yet there was a tremendous shortage of food and other necessities. Men sat hungry, pockets full of gold, dreaming of the lavish dinners they would buy back home! By the spring of 1897, long rows of pay dirt filled the valley of Rabbit Creek (newly renamed ‘Bonanza Creek’). When the spring thaw came, the miners dammed the creek and used the water to sluice gold from the dirt. What they found exceed their wildest expectations — when the first steamships made it up river, sixty eight miners left for civilization carrying with them over three tons of solid gold! On July 17, 1897 the prospectors and their staggering wealth reached Seattle.

Almost immediately the rush was on. Newspapers were a relatively new form of mass media out West, and they fanned the flames of hysteria, exaggerating the huge strike into mythical proportions. At the same time the new trans-continental railroads allowed an unprecedented number of people to pursue the wealth. The papers in Seattle and San Francisco, sensing the fortunes to be made, promoted themselves shamelessly as the most desirable ports of departure. Soon, hundreds of ships and boats of every description were making their way north to Skagway and the Klondike Trail. What the would-be miners didn’t know would soon stun them. After all their efforts — crossing the continent by every imaginable means and enduring unbelievable hardships — they arrived in Dawson City to find all the creeks had been claimed. Some stayed to eke out a living, others left to chase other Gold Rushes in Nome and Fairbanks, but most drifted home, changed forever by their experiences.

Crown King Lode Gold

Introduction: This is an article from the “old style” site here, it’s still live but I thought you might enjoy it here too. There were few places to resupply after starting the trip, so any traveling party would need to pack enough food for the entire journey of four or five months, plus some extra to avoid the fate of the Donner party of 1846. Fortunately, guidebooks written at the time provided potential travelers with descriptions of the journey and suggestions for provisions. Conlin presents work done by historian John Mack Faragher, who surveyed several guidebooks and compiled a composite list of the food supplies required for a four person party. Most parties had some type of firearm, usually a rifle and about 250 rounds of ammunition.

It is estimated that a basic set of provisions consisted of the following: 600 pounds flour 120 pounds biscuit 400 pounds bacon 200 pounds lard 200 pounds dried beans 120 pounds dried fruit 60 pounds coffee 40 pounds salt 8 pounds black pepper 8 pounds saleratus (a chemical evener) 4 pounds tea Assuming a 125 day crossing, a daily ration would be something like 1.2 pounds of flour, 0.8 pounds of bacon, 0.4 pounds of lard, 0.4 pounds of dried beans, and a quarter pound of dried fruit, which could be estimated to be about 7,000 calories per day, of which 2,200 came from bacon and 1,600 from lard (Conlin reports 10,000 calories per day but his appendix appears to have some calculation errors that lead to a few thousand extra calories).

Keep in mind, however, that lard was also used as axle grease and as fuel for lamps. For reference, the USDA estimates that the average American diet in 2004 consisted of 3,900 calories per day. To add some variety to the rather monotonous diet, emigrants brought whatever preserved fruit, jams, and alcoholic drinks they could fit into the wagon, and along the way caught fish where they could and hunted for bison, prairie dog, squirrel and various other animals. From other travelers and Native Americans, they learned which berries and plants were edible. Although the diet is particularly lacking in vitamin C, some argue that scurvy (a debilitating and often fatal disease caused by lack of vitamin C) was rare along the trail, probably because the dried fruit contained a small amount of the needed vitamin and because it takes many months of a low vitamin C diet to become scorbutic. Scurvy didn’t start to appear until a bit later, after the emigrants had been in the mines for a few months.

Prospecting supplies were not purchased until they arrived in the gold fields. An original writing of Victor Gauer.

Arizona Gold Nuggets

I wanted to share a few tips with you about transporting your metal detector on a quad. I have friends and have seen a lot of people who like to put them in the rubber rifle holders. This is a great way to avoid having to break the machine down and just be able to grab it and quickly go hunting for gold nuggets. One big disadvantage here is if your rubber rifle mounts are worn out you can end up shaking the electronic components loose and have a infield electronics failure.

So if you use this method make sure that you eliminate as much vibration as possible. I like to transport my metal detectors completely disassembled and wrapped in soft cloths or other padding inside of a quad box. It does take the more time to reassemble and disassemble the machines but I’m also insuring that I’m taking the best care of my expensive gold prospecting and nugget shooting metal detectors.

Tie Your Gold Hunting Boots

I’ve talked about this many times before but it’s a great reminder that one of the best ways to be successful in a new area when gold prospecting and mining is it take a hike and get a good lay of the land on foot. You’ll really get a better appreciation of the area and it will help you find possibilities that you may have never seen. Also I like to pre-scout areas using Google Earth.

The big advantage is a good hike gives, is not only believe the land but the opportunity to find contact and drop zones in other areas where gold can be. I’ve been lucky many times in new areas discovering hand stacked washes that were no where visible from the road. The hand stacking in the washes shows that some time in the past gold was found by old timers. This fact tell me it is a great area for to start looking in. It also gives me a high percentage of a chance of a quick score. So next time you visit a new area scout it out first on Google Earth, when you get there commit a few hours to hiking around in understanding the area and the opportunities that it presents to find gold. By doing this you’ll end up with more gold in your poke.

Near Crown King Arizona

I like to share some tips about the food you can bring on your gold hunting camping trips. I like to keep it simple and do not like to spend a whole lot of time prepping food for cleaning up. I really want my time to be best bat out the goldfields looking for nuggets and gold specimens  My favorite breakfast foods are pre-made oatmeal with dried fruit, it’s easy to heat up some water plus you’ll get some good proteins, carbohydrates and sugars for the day.

For lunches I really like peanut butter sandwiches, granola bars and beef jerky. at the end of the day when it’s time to make dinner I’m usually tired as my friends and I have been out of the goldfields all day; usually 8 to 10 hours. My main goal is just to crack open a cold beer and sit by the campfire telling jokes and laughing with my friends and if we’re lucky, showing off our nuggets.

Canned soup is a great way to end the day, not only is it usually a hearty meal it’s usually got quite a bit of sodium in it that you need to replenish from heavy activity. The best part is all this requires a little or no refrigeration in mild temperatures. I also like to bring fresh fruit such is bananas and oranges. Simple preparation super clean up add more time hunting gold, although there are those times when I like eggs and grilled burgers. Lucky for me I have an amazing girlfriend who spoils us when we’re out in the gold fields

Arizona Gold Nuggets

I encourage you to at least 1 time try a very minimalistic approach to finding gold nuggets and flakes. Head out to area for you know gold is been found before and take some very simple tools. Just take along a screwdriver shovel, pick and gold pan. It’s going to require some thought of how to maximize the tools potential for finding placer gold. After 8 or 10 hours of doing this you’re certainly have a new appreciation for the old timers went through. Many of them have even less tools and very little knowledge about what they were doing. You might even be surprised at the amount of gold you can fined with this method. If you learn one thing from this exercise it may be patience and understanding coupled with a little luck can help pick the right spot to be successful with gold prospecting.