On my weekends off I spent many hours dredging the Second Broad River from Cane Creek Road up to the headwaters. I used a three-inch dredge with air and graduated to a five-inch with air.

One of the first things we did while looking at buying the equipment was figuring out how it would dovetail into the milling process we already had in mind.

Our group of independent miners have been busy crafting a uniquely designed ladder/ore cart track from the bottom of an 85-foot mine shaft in a historical hard rock mine.

All these decisions and more depend on the richness of a claim—something that is determined by sampling. But sampling isn’t cheap, and even collecting the samples can be more difficult than it appears on the surface.

It’s not easy to figure out what is best without testing, and so a certain level of confusion has developed about how small the ore ought to be crushed.

“The evidence is clear—mineral deposits alone are not enough to attract precious commodity investment dollars...”