There are some nice air-breaks and drops in the upper part of this photo, just below the ripples. You’d look for bedrock, of course, but first, you’ll want to find the exact water-break where the floodwater allows the gold to drop straight down through an air pocket. Gold wants to fall first, and will be ahead of all the other heavy minerals, slightly upstream from the sand, where the gravel falls and the heavier metals will be found.
Here’s Uncle Claude’s photo of Bill Albin walking the route toward the camping area; you can pitch a tent here if you don’t mind sharing your space with the bears — they’re friendly and most anxious to meet anyone with anything resembling food. There are campgrounds aplenty all around, and lots of rentals. Living right there on the claim is not recommended, and it’s less than three minutes from the established and sleeping areas.
I’m kinda busy right now, too busy to do anything but this one job — I’m right in the middle of sorting out the hundreds of 18k and 24k gold jewelry items I made back in the day when I could do that sort of thing. I’m planning on doing a meltdown of all the unsold gold items and then selling the melted gold at the gold melt price. This includes many amulets, solid 24k gold repousse works and all manner of solid 18k gold wire items, many Rumi hearts, etc.
Why am I doing this? Because gold is $1300 an ounce, which makes it totally unaffordable even to the very rich. My jeweler friends tell me that they haven’t sold anything but wedding sets for the past 10 years, and that at $35 an ounce, silver is hard to sell, too.
The fact is that high-grade 18k and 14k gold jewelry — the kind I used to sell through Isis Gallery on Rodeo Drive — just isn’t selling anymore, and won’t again in my lifetime, at least not as personal jewelry. So, it’s time for my jewelry collection to go into the melting pot. My silver rings will soon join the gold, and when the time is right, I’ll melt down the copper rings, necklaces & bracelets, too.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby
As many folks know, Claude and I have a goldmine that we haven’t worked in many years. Why not? Simple reason: doesn’t pay. Why not? Simple answer: to make a gold mine pay, you need OSHA clearance, among other things. You need a license to exploit mineral rights, even on your own property. The biggest problem is, you don’t want to advertise where your mine is located — that’s inviting disaster in a hurry. The other increasingly obvious reason is that we’re just too dang elderly for all that climbing and hiking and bending and waterlogged drenchings and cold misty mornings. On the other hand, a few expeditions in there every so often wouldn’t be too bad. Here’s the deal: we can’t take in a workshop — it’d reveal the location of the mine, the very last thing you’d want to do. One more major piece of information weighing in rather heavily…gold is at the bottom of a price-test, and that means people are not interested in buying it right now. The public only buys a thing when it’s at the top of its price range, so when gold goes up and up and up, they’ll eventually buy — right at the tippy-top of the market. Then, quite predictably, when gold goes back down, as it always does when traders take a profit on the way up, they sell. Pardon my chuckles. So the gold mine has sat for several decades with nobody seemingly interested. But all of a sudden, we’ve had three inquiries about the mine, all from the same general direction…