What a great summer for weather.

This has really been a great summer in regards to weather if you like hot. Also there hasn't been as many bugs as usual.

We have been exploring the area, making sure we are not going to leave a good area. We are closing things up here and reclaiming the mine site. We are bouncing on our minimum profitability running goal post. We feel that the area looks great in our pans but the pay area is too thin to make it worth mining. With the expense of having to cut trees to get access to the pay dirt, this adds time and effort that makes it unfeasible to work the area. We also have to remove a portion of the top layer and this also adds to the expense.

It has been lots of fun taking our modified quad(backhoe) into areas that most can't go. Pictures above. While we were prospecting for gold we always are watching for other rocks and minerals. During an outing last week Mel found a piece of Rhodonite(float- meaning it is not in place and not sure how it got there). This is a rock that is similar to Jade but pink. Uncommon in these parts but none the less very interesting to see.

We have discovered another area close by but need to do more work to know if its feasible to run. This means back to the shovel. Our gut feeling is that it is similar to the area we are in right now but there are some differences in the make up of the gravel. This new area has larger rocks on the surface and this makes us think that there should be more and larger pay.

One thing we have decided is that a miner is a miner and a prospector is a prospector. There is not enough time (or money) to be both. They both have to be dedicated to what they are doing. When we leave this area we will let someone else do the prospecting and we will commit to mining.

We have had some company the last week or so. Dave a friend and his son Steve are out cutting the trees we have knocked down and he will use them for his farm in Mackenzie. hey are using a portable sawmill. Dave is a prospector and is more into the hard rock hunting but has helped us a lot. He is a great wealth of knowledge when it comes to rocks and minerals. We feel soooo lucky to have him spend time with us as we learn a lot from him.

We are not running at the moment because the other King pin is going on the backhoe. We have ordered the parts and they should be here on Wednesday. So this gives us time to do a bit more prospecting and start getting things in order around camp to take our first load of stuff home. Moving is going to be a big job so we are going to try and spread out the move. We hope to be gone by mid Sept.

It is amazing how attached we have become to the area. We have been here for 6 years and this has been home longer than anywhere we have lived.

There is a great book I have read in the past "Who moved my cheese" great book! Something everyone should read when going through changes.

Oh, with the extra time on our hands Mel has started smoking weed. Now let me explain this. She is very interested in plants and the medicinal values. She has discovered that by smoking a certain plant it is said to help with Asthma. I am sure she will explain. Being out here really brings you back to the outdoors living. (This is Melanie speaking and the weed is pearly everlasting, and I don't get high, lol! Picture above!)

OK time to get on with the day. It looks like another great day.

Working it out!

It has been a long time since I blogged. We have been working hard at locating anything that will pay. We have come up with a mininmum gram per load and it seems to always fall just short of the minimum.

We have been doing some major panning to learn the paydirt in this area. When we find something promising we run 10-20 loads. If its good we continue, if not we close up the area(reclamation). If nothing else it is a great learning curve for us. I feel this takes us to a new level of knowledge for placer mining.

We sure like the new Jig system. It does require more attention (maybe because we are still learning) but its great to be able to do 10 loads and have results in a hour or so. The entire system is running great! We had a goal of 8 loads per hour when we started and have got the loads per hour up to 10 and feel we still have room to go. Slowly tweeking things and not over loading. With the added loads per hour we can set our minimum grams/load lower and still make money(if we find above the new minimum).

We had some great company for a few days. John from Maple Ridge and his son in law Olivier from Ottawa (working in Whitecourt). This was a nice change for us. We prospected, did some quading, hiking and ate great. Thanks to Mary Ann for all the great food she sent along and to John for bringing the nice moose meat.

They were great company to have, we talked about different ideas of how the gold could have been deposited. We tested areas by panning and John brought a drill to drill sample holes. I think John really enjoyed the Royal Chinet and Olivier probably enjoyed finding some gold!

We have found an area to run that is bouncing close to our minimum. We ran 59 loads and its holding up so lets keep our fingures crossed. Even with the dissapointing results I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. It's like farming, got to take the good years with the bad.

So I am going to change my saying for now.

From, I'm not looking for the mother lode just a truck load.

To, I'm not looking for a truck load just a quad trailer load. :)

Ken

July 18th, 2010 - Bad Bad Bloggers.....

Well it seems we are getting worse and worse at blogging as time goes on. But honestly we do have a good excuse!

To be honest we've been avoiding blogging because we don't have much good news these days. I guess the blog didn't only have to be about good news, it should be more about reality. Anyways when things aren't going great, writing about it is the last thing you feel like doing.

We can't seem to find enough gold to continue running. We haven't been running on a production basis since July 2nd. We decided it wasn't worth it to continue so we have been just testing and looking for some better ground. The thing is we can't move to another area without the required permits so we are forced to stay in this area for this year. So we'll keep you posted on how things are going, for now we'll just keep plugging away and see if anything pans out!

My mom came last week for a few days and it was really great to have her here. She wasn't planning on coming in July but at the last minute changed her mind, yippee! Seems we'll have a little company coming here in July and August as well, so that should cheer us up a bit :)

Well thats all I really have to say, nothing much else is new. Oh actually my garden isn't doing well, the weather has been poor and its far away so I'm not sure I always water it enough. Also I forgot about the fertilizer my aunt told me to use, maybe if I had of listened it would be good :(

Hope everyone out there is doing good, we sure love to hear from our friends and family. Have a good week!

July 1st, 2010 - Happy Canada Day!

Well happy Canada Day to all our blog readers, after travelling this year and seeing other cultures, I must say I am proud to be Canadian and feel blessed as well! We have a lot to be thankful for primarily our freedom and the standard of living we have grown accustomed to. We have so much.

We had another cool day out here at the mine, but I won't complain since long sleeves and jeans are may favorite outfit! We have a nice wood stove at the mine site to warm up by, and my "boss" and I enjoy coffee breaks throughout the day as well! I meant to take a picture of the stove today as its quite neat, its a 45 Gallon drum and looks like its made to be out in the sticks with hillbillies using it, oh wait a minute, we are out in the sticks, need I say more!

Well my mother arrives home today, she is in flight as we speak! I am very excited although her plans have changed and I won't be seeing her anytime soon. She was supposed to come out in July but she got a pneumonia and ended up in the hospital in China for 2 weeks. That was 2 weeks ago. So she has been recouperating and through the process has decided she will not be returning to China for another year of teaching :( So she'll come out in the fall after Keith goes back to China for another year of teaching.

She has had some respiratory issues in the past and between the snotty nose germ carrying kindergarten kids, the pollution and all the mold because of the humidity she decided it would be best to stay in Canada, her doctor agreed. She wasn't too thrilled about being so sick in a foreign hospital either, we can only imagine, they only forgot to feed her 2 days, no biggy! Oh ya and they don't think its right to eat pork or chicken when you are sick? Interesting.

So once it does get nice again we're going to enjoy miller time in our new gazebo we bought when we went home last week. Yup thats right, gazebo, not a screen tent! Screen tents are for camping, and in my opinion after 2 weeks its not camping! We decided we are out here way to many months and a nice roomy area to sit would be nice, also we were thinking we could use it at home in the future if need be. Thanks to Mike and Wendy for lending us your awesome screen tent for the last couple years, we loved it and enjoyed many hours of conversation in that tent!

Well I'm off to eat some supper and then hit the hay, happy Canada day everyone and welcome home mom and Keith!

Running great!

The first picture is showing ice on June 30th! The 2nd picture is the alligator filter kind of hard to see. If you need a more detailed picture let us know, lol!

Well the system is running great! We have had very few issues. One of the issues we did have was having one of the pump intake screen plug off. The intake would slowly plug off and starve our big dredge of water. This would slow our production down. It started getting to the point we had to pull the intake and shake the debris off and put it back. This cuts the water going to the system and as a result stops production.

Last year we had built a system to resolve this issue but had never needed it at the new site until now so we brought it over from the other mine site and installed it. We call it the alligator filter. Its a filter that floats and takes only the top 2-3 inches of water off the pond. The top layer is the cleanest water but this water has lots of floating debris. This is where the alligator filter does its job by taking only the top layer and has a set of filter bags to catch the debris. We can change out the bags while we are running. Never stopping production because the alligator is a floating system, it doesn't matter what level the pond is as long as its floating. By the way this is a home made system not on the market as far as we know. :)

Something else we have recently built was an underwater demagnetizer. Well that's what we call it anyway. One of the hardest parts of concentrate(black sand, garnets, ect. mixed with the gold) is the black sand is very heavy, not as heavy as gold but creates a challenge when trying to separate the gold. We created a device to take the magnetite out. We can fill a hopper and the system separates the magnetite from the other heavies. It does not leave just the gold but it takes a lot of the trouble concentrate out of the loop. Saving lots of time.

The weather has been cool. Yesterday we woke to +1 and frozen standing water and +2.4 today.

The other night we had a storm pass over. Wow did it rain thunder lighting and hail. Its extra creepy when your in the middle of nowhere. Questions like, is the tower grounded enough is the 5th wheel grounded enough, should we sleep at the lower level of the 5th wheel. Is the hail going to break our vents or damage the roof. I bet my cousin Kim can relate with bad storms breaking things living in Iqualuit during winter storms!

No problems though, the storm passed and its the highlight of the week.

With the cold weather it keeps the bugs away so this is nice!

Mystery Foot Prints

We took a little holiday and went home for a night. We got to visit some friends and also did some shopping. The trip was great. It was a nice change. We left Wednesday morning early and got back Thursday night late.



When I arrived at the claim, as always I am looking for tracks. Also watching for bear sign and if any vehicles or people were around. I'm more worried about people out here than bears. As I am walking to the trommel I notice tracks from someone walking around in our site. This is well beyond our danger sign and chain we have up. The sign doesn't say stay out just warning danger(that's changed now). So nothing is gone and doesn't look like they took anything but of course its hard to remember how many gerry cans I had a few days ago. We have ten, now I have counted and numbered them to save confusion or concern.

So no problem just a snoopy passerbyer that doesn't know boundaries? Two days later I arrive at work. It was Sunday so we had a bit of a sleep in. When I got there there were vehicle tracks in the driveway but not just tracks, someone was spinning the tires in 2 spots. This gave me a major rush as I ran down to see what was gone! To my relief nothing. As I back tracked I looked for foot prints. Someone did pass the gate but only 25 ft or so. It looks like they had a real hard time backing out. They caught their tire on a hill and spun out and I can't figure out why for the second spin out?? Very nerve wrenching. I have a huge suspicion they were drinking. The tracks looked fresh not to long before I got there. An hour maybe 2.

So we got rid of the danger sign and posted a sign saying, If you want to visit that's great but if you come when we are gone the cameras are on. Boy this sure gave us thoughts of my Mom and Dad's sign. "YOU R WATCHED". lol





So again nothing was gone and now we leave a video running during the night. It doesn't run all night but its better than nothing.

June 17th, 2010 - Calm Before the Storm...

I like to use dramatic titles to capture the audience, lol. In the morning it was sunny then in the afternoon while we were running it stormed, rain, hail, lightening & thunder! It was a pretty good storm, but was very nice to have shelter underneath our carport we bought from Costco. Macee absolutely hates thunder so during the storm she decides to do a bolt herself and sets off running right towards the backhoe while Ken was working. Freaked me out because it happened so fast, I could just see her getting run over. She is almost perfect except for a few little glitches like that one! Ken heard me yelling at her and was able to spot her, so he put her in the machine until the storm passed.

Chloe on the other hand hardly opened her eyes during the storm, she was mostly concerned with staying warm under the coat she was in on the chair. Although Chloe presents her own issues such as chasing bears like Ken mentioned in his post the other day. It was pretty scarey for me even though Macee and I were driving in the truck at the time. There was 2 nice looking bears and Chloe put the run on them, so I sat and wondered for the 2 minutes she was gone if she would be coming back, ever! Its amazing when you are in the midst of a situation what goes through your mind.

So yesterday I went and checked on my garden and the radishes, onions, lettuce and spinach are growing great even though its been freezing at night. Can you imagine its the 17th of June and its still freezing, crazy. I'll be surprised if we harvest anything at this rate. I've included a picture of some prints I found in my garden, what do you think they are? lol. I guess we'll just accept the fact we are cohabitating with some fluffy black bears and try to be careful. They aren't being pesty at all, they aren't bothering us or coming near us either, so we'll let them be and hope they move on. My mother said we should shoot them, this was before we ever even saw them. But I didn't get bushwise from my mother so I won't take her advice on this one! I said to her "how do you suggest we kill something we have not seen?" she said "I don't know, sit outside with a gun and wait for them". (It was 3 weeks before we saw them, lol) Well since we're out here to mine I think we'll stick to mining and let the bears live their life, afterall this is their home, not ours. Don't get me wrong if they became problematic we would have to do something, but here's hoping there is no drama!

We have made friends with another animal though, some barn swallows have decided to make a nest in our shelter at the mine site. They eat the mosquitos so we're letting them stay, its kind of neat to watch them build their nest day by day, and also to see Chloe yell at them and chase them. There is two of them and one sits there quiet with some sticks in his mouth while the other one sits there and sqwaks at him non stop. I have a feeling they are having relational difficulties. Well I have no tv to watch so I have to analyze something don't you think!

Well we're off to work, hope everyone has a great day!