Small Mining Operations

The same day, while two of us were heading to Vancouver to attend the mining convention, two others from our team were headed to Nevada to begin loading the millsite equipment.

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.

So let’s dive in and see what I can do to convince you that this is the year you should be out staking your own claims.

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.

George was considering filling his dredge floats with closed-cell foam, ensuring that there would be no area available within each float for flooding.

We descended hunched over, down a long, steep, wooden staircase to the 1,000-level.

The burning question I needed answered was why didn’t the deposit ever get mined of at least one of the valuable minerals? A couple of reasons have come to light.

Many of the Sixteen to One’s challenges arise from its unusual geology and the pocket characteristics of the ore deposits.

Palladium may well be an underexplored element and therefore an opportunity for prospectors and geologists. This is because they are often less than obvious and other than the native metals, a chemical analysis of samples is required to identify PGM-enriched rocks.

I had a chance to visit the operation in person and talk with Neal. I was very impressed and I think our readers could learn a lot about building up a commercial placer operation from scratch…

One of his friends had 700 feet of small-gauge mine track and a hundred-year-old track bender laying out in his back 40; plus he also wanted to join the team. Perfect.

When it was all setup and running, you had everything coming off the dredge riffles into the boil box. At the hole section, some of the water got sucked down and pulled a lot of black sand and over heavies…

This was no ordinary nugget. It had not traveled very far from its nearby source, and that did mean a lot, as we were searching for the source of several such nuggets found during a gold rush that occurred in 1859.

They tend to be big, coming in large to extremely large sizes. They can also be amazingly rich and produce huge amounts of very high-grade ore.

All 28 groups listed agree that Section 402 of the Clean Water Act does not apply and no dredge miner should be asking a state or federal agency for such a permit.

Silver recovery from low-level solutions is frequently done in a cell that has a cathode with 2 to 5 or more times the surface area as the anode.

…the men sought to “inject false and misleading information about the genuine supply and demand for precious metals futures contracts into the markets, and to deceive other participants”…

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.

Silver refining has been used from ancient times to change the characteristics of the metal. Early metallurgists refined silver by heating it a couple hundred degrees above its melting point and holding the metal at an elevated temperature for a period of time.

A two-pronged approach is necessary to restore suction dredging; federal preemption needs to be established as addressed above via petition; and clarification from the EPA is needed to establish that no Section 402 permit is necessary when there is no “addition” of a pollutant.