Many times when we are digging our butts off we think that it sure would be great to have a backhoe for a day or two. Man we could make short order of all this overburden. You know while we are at it lets take it down a little deeper too. We think these things and sometimes wish for them. Well as you know our wish came true. A little to true. We actually wanted to expand the hole south about 30 feet and to the west about 30 feet. What we got was a hole 30 feet by 75 feet. Now you might be saying to yourself what the hell you complaining about you got lots of room to work now. Well, your right we have plenty of room to work. Here is the problems. 1. On our orginal hole, he took it down 2 feet deeper than we wanted and did not separate the the tailings. 2. We have a ridge that splits our hole from north to south that the backhoe couldn’t even move so all that material was left in place. Lastly, from the ridge to the west end of the hole I asked if he could clean it up just a little so I didn’t have to remove so much by hand(I have a very bad lower back). This he did and did a very good job.

Well Doc and I looked it all over and Doc decided that he was going to work the old area and only wanted a space 20 foot by 20 foot and that I could have the rest.

I figured hey why not gives me more to explore and get a better fell for the way bedrock was going. One of the areas I marked out in blue in one of the pictures turned out to be empty material. So I took the jack hammer to the bottom and spent 7 hours busting up the bottom. Sunday a friend and I went out and cleaned up everything we could with the vac and ran it. We got a little gold but realized we are probably 2-4 feet from bedrock. So it looks like I’ll spend most of the season on the jack hammer and vac. The next 3 pictures are not in any order they are just shot of what I’m up against this season. Now as to what you wish for, well no regrets.