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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Monday, June 27, 2011 at 21:35:28 :
In Reply to: closeup posted by clueless [196.40.10.231] on Monday, June 27, 2011 at 20:57:57 :
That's a nice pocket piece. A fellow I know here likes to poke around the old mine dumps up around Murray just to see if anything has been exposed by the weather over the years. It's kind of an excuse to get out in the woods. As far as I know he never uses a metal detector. The first time out he found a 3 ounce nugget, that's his pocket piece now. He's found a lot of nice nuggets just by walking around and looking. Another guy I know likes to do what he calls "sniping" gold. He swims around in a river with a mask and snorkel looking for nuggets on the bottom. I guess he finds some. Wouldn't be my idea of fun.
Of course the thing with gold mining is if it was easy, gold would be cheap. It's like gambling -- everybody tells the story of their lucky strike, and those stories get repeated. Of something like 100,000 men who joined in the Klondike gold rush, only 100 came back with more money than they started with. In the old days, gold ore was measured in ounces per ton. These days it's grams per ton and all the serious production is cyanide heap leaching. The process is simple: remove a suitable mountain, grind it to dust, spray cyanide solution over it, collect the effluent, and precipitate the gold. Makes a hell of a mess of the mountain, though, getting a couple grams of gold out of each ton of rock.
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