Big Equipment, Big Mine, Big Gold!

foreign [Music] Blaster mine flat Bear Mining they are friends of mine Joe and Carson run this big plaster mine this is the biggest plaster of mine I have had the honor of visiting I'm here to do a whole video today on their mind everything is going on and I hope you enjoy [Music] so this here is my buddy Joe he is the chief Miner here the the owner operator of the flat bear mine that is right yeah there we go and uh thank you so much for inviting me out today oh you're welcome anytime Dad we're gonna have a lot to see and hopefully some great gold at the end of the day perfect thank you [Music] and this is my buddy Kirsten well I have lots of explaining to do along the way but what all's going on here what they're doing on this site all the Reclamation all the gold all the Rocks they're fighting the penal light everything I hopefully can explain that all throughout this video I'm just a little overwhelmed at the moment because there is so much great stuff going on [Music] [Applause] let's get some save some safety for everything safe and official before we go and now Joe has invited me into the cleanup room just to look at how they clean up the golden here I know this is very much out of order but uh I'm gonna have a look and hopefully by the end of the day we actually get to see some gold going over this thing so last time we were here Joe you only had a small Shaker table you got something a bit bigger going on now oh yeah I know just an extruder cable it can get very loud around a mine site that has all these big equipments going by the loader just drove by as that Joe was talking I couldn't even hear what he was saying but yes they do have a brand new Shaker table the bigger Shaker table in the past they were just using the little guy and now he uses the bigger one in combination with the little one for cleaning up their gold at the end of the day he just threw some old ponds in to see if we could see a little bit of gold shaking down but really we don't have much until the end of the day so last year I was on this site doing a video here on the piano light that new gemstone that was discovered here in British Columbia these are the miners who discovered it they discovered it falling off the end of their D rocker there were these beautiful amazing rocks that were just being tossed away that they discovered was actually an amazing gemstone called pinolite or pinolith well when I was doing that video last year I did a little bit about the gold mine and then a whole lot about the penalite and so many of my viewers said damn show us more of the gold show us the gold mine so I came back this year to do a video solely on the gold mine I might show you a piece of peanut leather too but today is about the gold mine Joe said he found a little bit of his cons to throw through the machine to give us a little taste of gold well the guys out there do their thing but don't worry I'll be showing you them doing their thing as the day goes on classifying the cons out so it can run over the Shaker table he just looking at the the big stuff to see if there's any gold in the big stuff and there's a piece of gold in the big stuff ice and the next pan well the next classifier full was loaded in bigger pieces the first one had one the next one had 10 20. we'll get those all in one spot We'll add in the one I stole earlier and we'll get a good shot of that is amazing now Joe this was some stuff you concentrated the day before yesterday or something um it was just uh the cleanup from the high bank that was off to the size of the main uh okay uh it's a high banker run you did that was just sitting there waiting to be cleaned up to give you an idea here's my finger coming in show you the size the scale really coarse gold here this stuff is fresh from The Rock absolutely [Music] just a little bit of a teaser from yesterday's material what's your appetite for some gold man just pull one off the table there's a little 0.1 picker well there's the cheese now let's go out and see what's going on out here they tell me they're doing their first shutdown down for the morning to have a look and see how things are going great chance to look in the box [Music] so one of the reasons we're showing you the cleanup room here at the beginning of the day rather than the end is at the end of the day when we shut down the big wash Plant we're going to be able to go through and find the pickers and nuggets and all that but then all the fine stuff gets put aside to be run later that night or the next day when I might not be here so we want to show you what goes on in the cleanup room it now in case I can't show it to you at the end of the day but I think it's time now to maybe go out there and see what's happening at the mine site itself and I didn't really get to introduce Carson other than in the loader there's my buddy Carson how's it going dad excellent excellent thanks for having me out here this is awesome now you missed all the rain yesterday yes they were saying this place was unbelievably dry two days ago oh yeah that was dust everywhere and there was a rainstorm now it's all mud there we go so estimate uh guess how much gold you could get the day like on a good day in that uh plant s [Applause] better spot so hopefully we're freaking I like to see a 30 40 in the pictures are you good 30 or 40 grams worth of Pickers not to find stuff just the pickers that would be awesome [Music] foreign [Music] once a day serve in the middle of the day yeah this is uh a little bit sooner than the middle of the day but right I gotta tighten the bolt on the excavator so a small repair job and you have at the very top a big section of expanded Steel on miner's moss then you have a big nugget trap right below it is that right that's right yeah and then back onto more expanded steel over miner's moss and a bunch of different capture Medias all the way down hydraulic ripples in the middle hydraulic oh yes section of hydraulic riffles right here hydraulic riffles pump water down through the ripples to keep things loose so that gold can fall through the gravels loose gravels easy so a lot of these big setups have a section in their sluice somewhere that has water pump to it and we call those hydraulic ripples Joe what were you pointing out gold I'm not supposed to do this I guess trouble for this yeah [Music] during their midday shutdown they clean out the Nugget box to see how things are going and to pull that material out for cleanup later they don't clean out the whole sluice they just take that one spot where the big the majority and the big gold is and pull it out halfway through the day and this is always the exciting spot time because if there's a big nugget this is often where you're gonna see it Paul do you see anything good nothing yet I know last year when I was here at this stage we saw a couple of nuggets sitting in those first uh in that first set of expanded steel up there we saw a couple just sitting there hopefully we see him again today ah this is some red meal of rock let the water drain off a bit more damn yellow rocks [Music] there's where the Nuggets fall right there you don't do this it sets up too much turns into concrete down there when you shut down yeah and in the Nugget trap is what this site is really known for a piece of penalite or penalith oh I heard we see one picker first of a whole bunch of Pickers okay we want to hear a great big boohoo from you over here was that three-quarter inch screen yes sir so if we find a nugget there it's a big and look at all the courts that's where the gold comes from that quartz for sure okay the excitement is starting now nugget nugget I think there was another nugget over there somewhere up there let's get some shots of those and I think those are big enough I can pick them out one nugget two nuggets free nugget let's pull those out have a look and while we're at it four nuggets there's another one there we are four nuggets picked out of the sluice and if anyone is worried I have full authority authority no the okay to do this from the mine owners they're standing here watching me very carefully and Paul just dropped that one in my hand he found in there somewhere and another you can see the structure of what this gold looked like in the quartz itself in the Bedrock you can still see the slight leaf pattern to it this stuff has not traveled far at all well the handful of nuggets and this is just what we could see on the surface and pick out there will be lots more in there not a bad start to the day and there's still lots of daylight to get more they're just starting things up again and Carson you're just clearing the upper riffle so they don't Concrete in right now no I'm taking the visible goal though oh you're taking this okay you're hydrating oh if you can see it why let it stay in here there we go you've already caught it might as well keep it well you're doing a lot of scooping so you must see a lot in there I take the whole spot once you see it that one's not coming out of there there's a small pile right there a little bit of gold scooped out of this loose just to make sure it's been captured and it's definitely capturing the gold plus a handful of nuggets perfect it's nice not having the equipment running for a second yeah Joe what kind of D rocker do you have here it's a it's a different Beast isn't it it's a super sluice D rocker a super sluice D rocker yeah and it's older than we are and it uses little fingers that push back and forth right if you don't mind getting dirty you can climb up the ladder when it's working and watch it just gotta what uh stay out of Paul's way I'll probably throw the Drone up and take a drone shot from right above it while he's working that way uh no one's in danger and here it comes again low water time to find some more gold yeah Joe was just telling me they just got this site this year this is the first year on this site they picked up this old mine site that was actually in very bad shape the previous owners left a mess and they bought it then convinced the government to let them run here as they cleaned up so what they're doing is they're cleaning up an old mine site and they're running the material that the old miners left behind and they're finding some very hot pockets that weren't mine and as they run they're reclamating or bringing it back to Nature because what was left here was very messy it wasn't less proper and they're here cleaning up old equipment because there was a lot of equipment left on site leveling out old tailings leveling out old pits replanting on top of it and making this look like that again back to what nature meant to look like but as they are reclaiming it they're running the hot spots that the old miners missed and as you can see from what we pulled out of the sluice there's a lot of gold there and this is one of the cuts they just did right here uh he says that there's a red layer you can see the top soil layer a red layer and then a gray layer and the red layer is the richest layer I might bring my metal detector over here and just detect over that and see if I can find anything they missed well the sun has come out it's a beautiful day all this moisture is drying up we're getting lots of gold we're having a blast who could ask for anything more let's go check out what's going on up there [Music] thank you this is amazing I love it here comes the next scoop [Music] so much nicer the sun's out now oh it's beautiful here's some of the penal so well known for beautiful that's a nice piece well let's pop that out of there I have a nice piece [Music] so Kirsten uh this much water flowing through its flute scares a lot of people they look at that and they say that's way too much what are your thoughts about the water flow here and you're running what's the biggest rock that can get through your D rocker oh for a three-minute dinner plates go through there all right no it's already down through yeah dinner place oh go through so yeah you don't want those until it happens no but typically you're looking at like uh two inch minus two inch two inch coming through here so we need enough water to move a two inch Rock and how often do you test your tailings for gold oh we're testing right now and then you always miss a little bit but freaking the amount you miss isn't worth trying to screen it yeah the cost to extract that is that and it's freaking adult yeah so if you do lose one percent because you have too much water going you're still putting through so much more because you have that much water that you get more gold in the end yeah you're fixing your ratio it's not worth it not worth it to try to capture that last one percent yeah so yes it's a lot of water but that's appropriate amount of water for this whole setup what size pump are you using on this fix it six inch pump [Music] we have to slow down the feed for a little bit the sluice as we're getting overloaded just too much material going through so we basically just skipped one bucket load in let this looses process properly and it's all good again back to feeding here at this site for two days one day here at the gold mine and tomorrow we're taking a helicopter up to the top of that mountain over there to do some prospecting up there in some pretty rugged terrain so make sure you check back next week for the video at the top of that mountain thank you [Music] [Music] so the way this is working is Joe is over in the cut digging and filling the dump truck bringing the pay over here Paul is up on the hill in the excavator feeding the plant and Carson is over there somewhere taking care of the tailings dumping the tailings and moving other material around for whatever Purpose with the three of them working today filled in nicely and Joe was just telling me that for next season they're looking for a new employee up here because Paul is only here temporarily and if you're interested in working at a plaster mine I will leave their contact information below you have to be dedicated you have to be committed you have to have your own RV that you can live on site but they are looking for an employee to help with this plaster mine of theirs there's a cool looking piece of Pinot light I think I'll buy that off the guys take it home cut it and let you guys see what it looks like inside the chief cutter is putting the rock in the saw as we speak and there we are fresh off the Saw the amazing penalite jungle scenes look at that flower beautiful scenes that's why we love our penalite that's the good stuff oh look a nugget that's Peter and this is the material after the Gold has been extracted here's the tailings [Music] time for some fuel the fuel truck has arrived so I was going for a joyride on the loader he was showing me where he was playing the tailings and the Reclamation they were doing and the fuel truck showed up and Carson gonna close his eyes and says oh this is going to be an expensive day I guess they go through a lot of fuel here I'll ask him that in a bit how much fuel they actually use but I'll buy a few hundred pounds of that penalight off them to sell on my web store www.danhardprospecting.com that should offset their fuel costs a little bit it's a joke how much fuel do you think you burn in a day up here with all the machines going average day we'll burn 800 liters somewhere in there 800 liters yeah and a delivery like this how much do you take on uh nine thousand nine thousand liters you say you burn a thousand bucks a fuel a day it's easy yeah a gold mining operation is not cheap that's for sure now Joe this is an old mine site that you took over to both mine and reclaim and bring back to its natural state can you tell me a bit about that so our objective is to get it reclaimed and find the little pockets of Pay Dirt that were left behind by the original Miners and so we go through and we spend about 50 percent of our time reclaiming and removing old equipment and the other 50 actual doing what we're supposed to be doing is mining excellent yeah reclaiming is not cheap so you are offsetting the cost of reclaiming by mining at the same time obviously making a profit yeah and eventually they hope to get this old mine site here looking like what you see on the other side of the road you can see down in the front here uh some stuff that is like a one or two year growth you can see in behind all those small trees that's probably like a 20-year growth and hopefully in one or two years this site will all be green like you see right over there there and then in 15 or 20 years it'll be reforested like you see off in the distance does that sound right that is exactly right yeah being that it's an old mine site you get to work completely within their old bound so you're not disturbing any new ground exactly right yeah we we don't go outside of the original disturbance area and every year we get a large piece reclaimed eventually get it all done and you said there was a mystery guy out here just a couple days ago that gave you the thumbs up and like what you're doing yeah the ministry of Mines did their inspection just a couple of days ago most they just wanted to see the finished product at the end of our season so if you are worried that it looks like they're absolutely destroying the environment here well this is a part of the mining process for sure but give us time and we will get it back to that and also remember mining like this is an essential part of everyday life to live the way that we've come accustomed to we need these Minds up operating you wouldn't have your cell phone if it weren't for these gold mines you wouldn't have your computer you wouldn't have your electric car you wouldn't have your regular car mines like this are essential to live the way that we've become accustomed to now in the past they've just destroyed the environment and left it the way it was nowadays with more modern mining techniques and regulations we are making sure that once we're done getting those minerals that we need as a society we then take the land back to what it looked like so if you are still upset about the damage that's being done and the Reclamation isn't enough to alleviate that upsetness don't Point your finger at the miners out there Point your finger at yourself I assume you have a cell phone in your hand right now cell phones would not be possible if it weren't for miners mining gold and all the rest of those Metals out there don't blame the miners they're just fulfilling a need of society big nuggets nice well this is probably the biggest nugget I have shown on any of my videos [Music] oh that's a handful of gold wow and that comes from up here somewhere foreign

Channel: Dan Hurd

Views: 129,756

Keywords: gold panning, prospecting, panning for gold, mining, gold, rock hunting, rock hound, rock collecting, british columbia, bc, video, canada, finding gold, gemstones, gem stone, gems, treasure hunting, metal detecting, diamond mining, metal detector, gold detector, gold river, metal detecting gold, gemstone hunting, gold panning for beginners, finding gold with a metal detector, metal detecting for gold, sluice box, how to gold pan, gold mining process, gupta dham, Real diamond

Id: iXdMPgoC4DI

Length: 25min 11sec (1511 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023