Whats Left Behind

Hi all,

I thought id share a bit of a story/tip with you about a recent trip panning with a few friends.

I took Michael and Mick to a spot I had discovered to work bedrock pockets (see the video below for info on that). We spent a total of 65 hours working a spot no bigger than two land cruisers of the course of 3 days. We were utilising a 6 foot breaker bar to pop open a soft sandstone base that then released trapped pockets of gravel, yabbie pumping off the bottom and repeating the process to this tiny area.

All said and done we took home two nuggets, and around 3.5 grams of gold. It was hard work because of the process to access the pay, but the total soil we moved was less than a cubic meter, rich pay dirt in any ones books.

Well I went back, with the water clear and fresh eyes I found numerous small hair line cracks in and around the hoes we had created in the bedrock. I spent 6 hours slowly cleaning out each of them with scrapers, pry bar and yabbie pump. The end result, 'clean' bedrock gave me 1.71 grams of gold. Out of holes that had 0 visible gravel in them.

So I just wanted to say, even if a spot looks absolutely done like we find in Slaty and Reedy, it's well worth having a second look.

The Video:-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S01irUqeNM-

Wish the video would play for me

I just copied :www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S01irUqeNM-
and it works ok.

Here it is:
[video=480,360]https://youtu.be/5S01irUqeNM[/video]

To much hard work for me. You guys can have it.

Awesome stuff

Hard work but fun also learnt a bit too.

Dogs had fun too.
Thanks for sharing.

Loved the video, Mick and his wife are wonderful people. Ken.

Thanks grubstake, I cheated and went straight to my YouTube subscription :beer: :Y:

One of the best tricks old mate taught me, was after (or during) cleaning bedrock, specifically granite based bedrock. Is to thump away with the crow bar before having he final pumps. You get so much more colour that way!

worked for me early today but it does work better if you have at least one red sock on .

johno

Diggertom said:

One of the best tricks old mate taught me, was after (or during) cleaning bedrock, specifically granite based bedrock. Is to thump away with the crow bar before having he final pumps. You get so much more colour that way!

Click to expand...

Agreed, that's because of the makeup of the granite. Its one big conglomerate of mixed rock so you get thousands of micro fractures in it that trap gold. That and in some places the gold sheds from the granite so you're essentially working load reef in those areas by breaking it up.

As much as a third of the gold mined from the "deep lead" gravels of Victoria actually came from fractures in bedrock underlying the gravels, not from the gravels themselves. And a lot of that got left behind in shallow alluvial mining (probably less so underground in leads because of the need for a level bedrock floor to run barrows and rails along). Some wider fractures were mined (rarely) to metres below the gravels, but most occurred within the top 30 cm of bedrock.

That is very interesting goldierocks. Thanks for sharing that little nugget of info :Y: