I have friends, that live in the Orange County area of California, that not only think but are convinced that my deck of cards have been shuffled to many times. First off, they can not understand why we live out in the middle of nowhere. I tell them that we are within a 45 minute drive of all the big stores and we don’t have to put up with the traffic.
Well I’ve been getting cabin fever for about a week now and I finally convinced myself that if I left early enough in the morning that I could get 3 or 4 hours work done in our placer hole. So I call up my partner, Doc, and convinced him too that we could do it(just a side note here, I’m trying to pick up my 52 cards today).
So off we go to the mine and get there at 5am ready to hit it. Now we knew we had alot of overburden to move so we jumped on that first thing. Well by 7:30am we were ready to start mining. After a short break, I started in the main hole and Doc started work on a new hole. I filled 6 buckets with material and ran them thru the drywasher and got ready to pan. Now all of a sudden I realized that it was down right hot out and that there was not a bee in site. I checked the tempeture and it was 101 degrees at 8:45am. I panned the cons and got 4 small pickers and about 1/4 inch of fines.
Well Doc and I continued this mad form of mining til noon when the tempeture got to 118 degrees. It was at this point that the both of us realized we were just plain crazy and needed to go home. It’s hell mining in the desert in the summer. It seems that the printing on the hi-lited picture did not come to clear. The black areas are where we removed the overburden and the yellow area is the gold bearing zone.