Lead and gold, good hobbies

[Digger]

Helps keep the sanity , playing with both ....:coffeecom26431

[Buckshot]

...............A buddy and I used to pan gold in Cajon Pass, here in So. California. Great fun, and we both built sluice boxes. Work like a Trojan moving 3 cubic yards of rock and dirt for a half a specimen bottle!

................Buckshot

[gnoahhh]

Always wanted to do that.

The only way I mix gold and my shooting hobbies is to replace the beads on front sights with gold cut out of my old wedding band. (I wish the ex could see me doing it!!)

[onesonek]

I got into panning the last trip out to the Black Hills. I enjoyed it alot!!! I have had thoughts of playing around here, just to see if a can find some. We sit on a large glacial gravel rift, left from the middle glacial period. The last period cut a melt channel through the middle. Just really curious to see if there is any gold in the banks of the channel.
Then too, just south of us, is a lot of exposed bedrock,,, may do a alil scratchin around there as well. Of all my research, I find mixed reports of the possibilities for the area,,,,,guess I will just have to find out for myself.

[Digger]

Hey there Buckshot .... Cajon pass is close by where I was raised as a kid ..My dad taught me how to pan for gold and I gained a love of history as a result of getting out and enjoying the the outdoors .
Holcomb Valley , north side of Big Bear is where I learned a lot and got hooked with the hobby.
With it's gold mining past , it was a fun place to be and explore.
With a little searching .... it's surprising where gold has been found in the states and where it still is available to this day , while no great amount .. enough to have fun and enjoy the results any how.

The sad part is now at this point in time in our " society" , the limits being imposed on us as individuals is frustrating ... " the law requires" ... yeah , so here we go again ...... both lead and gold are being more restricted as time goes on.
Lead with the environmental scare and gold , strangely enough , along the same lines ... the Governor of Calif. also listened to the greenies and outlawed dredging for gold by hobbyist in the streams and rivers.
Also restrictions on other methods of recovery ...

As some say , enjoy it while you can ? .... it's still fun scrounging for lead and gold where ever you can find it..:grin:

digger

[ReloaderFred]

Just before the big Y2K scare that some people bought into, an acquaintance said he was stocking up on gold, "just in case", and asked if I was buying gold? I told him "no, I'm stocking up on lead". He asked what good that would do, and I told him I'd use my lead to take his gold. He didn't think that was funny, but I did.....

I used to hunt rabbits in the Cajon Pass area to the west of the freeway, and quail to the east of the freeway, before San Bernardino County closed the area to shooting back in the 1960's and 70's.

Fred

[Bad Water Bill]

Many years ago I read a story of a man who found a rich deposit of BLACK sand. He spent the whole summer relaxing and filling 5 gal buckets with the sand. I will sort out the gold over the winter, he said. Each week he went through one of the buckets. As he panned he discarded the non productive sand in the municipal garbage dump. At the end of the winter the buckets were all empty, yes 20 of them and 0 golden flakes found.

The next year found him back at the same place but others had staked out the super rich site. One of the old timers told him that all of the black sand was actually GOLD covered with a black substance. Just heat it up and the black will burn off and you will recover about 90% gold.

I do not know how true the story is because I never followed up on it.

[Digger]

Hey there Bad Water , .. your story could be a twist on the old technique of using Mercury for recovery .
Used to be standard practice in the old days of using it to recover fine gold .... just put a little in the pan and all the fines would "amalgamate" with the liquid metal and they would keep using it till it turned to a silver paste , then cook it off over a fire leaving the gold behind but now we know to stay away from the vapors .
The big mining operations in those days used the method by large volume of course and there was a lot of waste ... bad by product...
Could be along the same lines as your story but the gold being coated with it looks grey not black ..any way I still find it on occasion today as I pan once in while one or two of the specks are covered with it ...looks a little like lead flakes ....
In this area of Nevada , east of Carson city , the historic Comstock district , the Carson river had several mill sites along the river and in those days they used that method and with the resulting waste going into the river ...today , the area is officially titled contaminated ....
Along those lines ... several years ago I met an individual that had done some dredging on the Carson back when (can you imagine the havoc that would raise today ??) and he told me of finding puddles of mercury amalgam in the bed rock , in the cracks here and there.
Sure wouldn't mind processing some of that today with the metals prices being what they are....
digger