After finishing our exploration of the main pit, we moved back up the canyon for one more look at the workings of the old miners.
It wasn't long before we broke into a huge underground room, directly underneath a surface hydraulic sluice. The accompanying photos clearly show the sluice emerging from the old surface tailings. Coming out of the puddle are posts from the old chamber. As we extracted more material huge roof beams emerged....Imagine the weight of these logs when they were first lowered down the shafts and dragged along the drifts to this location.
Cleanup from this area was the most difficult we've ever experienced. Over 40 ounces of fine gold was recovered from this area, but it was completely covered in Mercury, so it ran silver instead of gold on the wave table. If we hadn't been familiar with the action of the material and the performance of the table we would have thought we had been skunked, just looking for colour! The old-timers used mercury to 'soak up' fine gold, and then panned it out, and burned it off in what can only be considered an extremely hazardous situation. In the process of hydraulic mining, sometimes the mercury was poured right into the sluice boxes and that is clearly what happened here, with large quantities of it being sloshed out of the box and 'contaminating' the gold in the surrounding soils.
No comments:
Post a Comment