OXIDIZED GOLD QUARTZ SPECIMEN 1.31 GRAM GOLD AND QUARTZ GOLD BEARING

Description

NORTH AMERICAN
GOLD/QUARTZ /RUST
P
hotos are enlarged representations of offered item.   R
uler, if shown, is
1/4"
wide (actual size). A U.S. dime (10 cent piece) measures 17.5 mm in diameter.
F
eatured item is a rough chunk of epithermal quartz from California.  For serious aficionados of gold, here's what you're looking for, i.e.  native gold, rough, raw, and natural as a baby's shiny bottom. In this case, parent rock is attached.  The oro is lacy, crystalline, as lustrous and beautiful as any gold I've seen. The quartz shows oxidation-staining and a slight amount of iron mineral mixed in with the gold at one end. She'll look great in your micromount collection.
For years,
I crushed up copper-stained, rusty, pyrite-filled, and assorted burnt-looking rocks in my mortar. Occasionally, a little color would show up when panned out, but the Au content wasn't enough to weigh on my powder scale. If your interest is lode, however, tiny colors in a pan might be good-enough to warrant staking a lode claim. In some cases, large deposits of low-grade ore are developed into enormously-profitable mines.
Only once did I ever mill up a piece of ore with enough gold in it to register on my scales. Unfortunately, it was a fluke alluvial rock I picked up in a wash. There were no vein outcroppings anywhere close-by. In such cases, you're usually powerless to trace such rock back to their source.
Native gold + oxidized quartz
from California weighs
20.3
grains  -
1.31
Gram
Size:
16.5X9.1X8.8 mm
A
s
operator/sole proprietor at Gold of Eldorado, I actively mined gold for 18+ years. Beginning long ago, in a past life, perhaps, something in the golden mystique of this rare, precious metal attracted me to it. Searching for native placer (gold), working with it in it's different forms, and marketing became a life-way. If, like myself, you're a big fan of gold, there's a lot to see here at
Gold of Eldorado
.
Weight Conversions:
15.43 GRAINS = 1 GRAM
31.103 GRAMS = 1 TROY OUNCE
24 GRAINS = 1 PENNYWEIGHT (DWT)
20 DWT = 1 TROY OUNCE
480 GRAINS = 1 TROY OUNCE
S & H
COMBINED SHIPPING IS OFFERED. ON MULTIPLE PURCHASES, FOR CORRECT AMOUNT, PLEASE REQUEST AN INVOICE FROM THIS SELLER.
U.S. BUYERS - S&H .00 with tracking.
INTNL. BUYERS - S&H .00 shipped via USPS International First Class Mail.
PAYMENTS
For U.S. buyers: We accept paypal.
For intnl. customers: We accept paypal.
Pay securely with
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Payment must be made within 7 days from close of  auction.  We ship as soon as funds clear. If you have questions, please ask them before bidding.
REFUNDS
We leave no stones un-turned insuring our customers get what they bargained for.
If you're not satisfied with this item, contact me. If we can't resolve the problem, you may return item in  'as purchased' condition (within 30 days) for a refund. Exchanges are another option.
NOSE FOR GOLD
Guess I'm showing my age. Seems a pick-axe don't fit my hand the way it did thirty years ago. Everything changes, eh. Mining is work for a young man, not 'loaf-about-the-forts'. Trust I've done my fair share of hacking on clay banks and caliche beds. One aches thinking about all the rocks they've packed or pounded on. Fortunately,
my nose still twitches when a promising, gold formation comes into view. It took years to start figuring out how gold deposits relate to the terrain. Make no mistake, with the right tools and sufficient access, I can still sniff out gold.
One thing to remember is you can't find gold if you don't look; and without access to the better claims, you're stymied. Access entails variables no uninitiated prospector would understand. Every bit as important as recognizing gold-bearing formations is having the authorization/permission to open them up for sampling.  The former is useless without the latter.
For spotting placer, eighteen years of swinging a pickaxe, hiking the mountainsides, hammering out gold from river-bottoms, creeks, trenches, hydraulic cuts, and desert dry-washes, seeing where and how the old timers worked all the diverse deposits scattered around the old west taught me a thing or two about where gold likes to hide. You gotta open up clay and caliche hard-packs; dig down five, ten, twenty, or a hundred feet beneath the overburden; pry huge rocks away from their companions; test and see what the material looks like down amongst them; test the old tailings piles. Here, a gold pan becomes a miner's best friend. A prospector needs to check every nook, crack, and cranny where gold may be hidden. Whether placer or lode, the extensive physical sampling of a claim is key.
If it's placer you're after, sediments will be your medium and figuring out where golden strata lives. More often than not, you'll leave an area frustrated, for no matter how much gold exists in your vicinity, it won't matter if you can't open up the most-promising zones for test-work. Do you see what I'm saying about 'access' and it's connotations? Deep gravels, vegetation-covered bars, tree-root tangled creek-banks, enormous boulder packs, alluvial fans a hundred feet deep, and high terraces running back into the mountainside have a way of defeating a poor prospector before he even gets started. Even if you had X-ray vision and could see where the gold was, a person still has to figure out how to get paydirt out of the ground. Not that gold isn't occasionally found on the surface, it's just that ordinarily, it's not. It belongs to the land and she provides plenty of good hiding spots for her favorite metal.
One time, I watched a friend right from where he was sitting reach down and pick up a seven pennyweight nugget. That's all he had to do - look down, spot something unusual, and pick it up off the ground. Crazy, huh? No detecting, no digging, just sit there jaw-jacking with another guy working his butt off for nada (that was me!).
Generally, however, gold is buried beneath millions of other leaverites. Prospecting, identifying where the gold is - that's your first objective and a durned important one at that.  If you follow the earth's signposts i.e. rock formations, elevation changes, boulder packs, clay beds, black sand concentrations (and trails), twists and bends in a drainage (high and low), after a while, you will realize there are correlations between where gold settled and these geophysical features scattered around the landscape. After extensive testing of these zones, maybe you'll start to figure things out. Other times, you might find gold without having a clue how or why it came to be there. If sampling indicates the presence of gold, at some point, heavy equipment might be required for mining to commence in earnest. On many claims, heavy equipment is essential to perform the preliminary testing itself. On others, hand sampling may prove adequate. Someone once told me "to be a good prospector, you gotta have the eye of an eagle and be able to dig like a gopher." They said a mouthful there.
MINING IN THE YUKON
Yukon miners with their D9s and 10s move more ground in
an hour than I did in 18 years with an assortment of dredges and Georgia Drag Lines (shovels). Still, it boosts a guy's ego to compare those big-yardage, aggregate mover's to per cubic yard averages with my own. I'm certain to have done a heck of a lot better than two to four bucks per yard even with gold at less than 0 per ounce.
Lone wolf prospectors and small-scale hand-miners get real close and personal with gold. There were times I knew instinctively before sinking a pick that good gold was buried at or very nearby a particular spot. Granted, metal detectorists do this all the time, but they're relying upon electronics to first give them a 'hit', a definite target to dig for. For someone without aid of a detector to do this takes being very familiar with formations. In all fairness to high volume earth-movers, I was more of a nugget, pocket, and pay-streak-hunter
, a methodology I would describe as 'selective mining' or 'sniping'. A great many deposits, for a variety of reasons, are quite selective themselves. They're opposed to human intrusion. Rugged terrain which can't be accessed by anything other than a chopper is no place for big operators to find purchase. Cats, back-holes, not even ATVs can motor in to a lot of claims. If alluvium is plentiful, accessible, and abundantly gold-bearing, earth-moving machines and monstrous wash plants definitely have their place, but nothing beats going out there by your lonesome, digging by hand in places where nobody else thought to look, and finding that wild gold yourself. That's when you know you've become a pretty fair, back-country prospector.
Thanks for checking out my store.
G
old of Eldorado 6-5-12