Refining Pure Gold From An 1800s Gold Mine!

hello there my name is Brent and today we are going mining we are searching for gold I am up here in Washington at my friend Jason's mine we're going to learn all about gold underground mining and hopefully find some [Music] gold another thing I was able to do this month that I think just gave me a huge appreciation for everything that happened here in the past was to go underground Hard Rock Mining and this time instead looking for silver I was looking for gold my friend Jason has a mine up in Washington and so he invited me up to get the wood you see behind me but also to go gold mining and as mine they recently opened up I ended up with this 10 G of pure gold the process of which is not very easy but one that I now just appreciate so much more after the time up there Jason owns Mount Baker mining up in Washington and we met a couple years ago because I was trying to refine The Ore here at SRO Gordo the Galina which is lead and silver all the way down to Silver so I was looking around online for anybody that would know how to do this and Jason seemed like the guy you know so a couple years ago we refined 100 lb of ore out of the Union mine here made it into some silver and became pretty good friends in the process and a couple months ago he was like listen you know if you want to make your way up to Washington I'd love take you into this gold mine that I'm reopening from the 1890s and to me the idea of reopening a mind to actually mine it again is very interesting you know I think I'm always trying to understand the history here I think part of that is putting myself in the places that these miners used to be so meaning the union mind but also trying to understand what life would have been like for them you know and so Jason offered me to bring you underground you know we're going to go mucking we're going to refine some of the ore and just get a better sense of underground mining so I made my way up to Bellingham Washington which is Jason's Hometown and from there it's about 2 hours to his mine the mine's out by Mount Baker which is equipment shop is named after and Jason just has an amazing connection to it this mine was originally open in the 1890s they pulled many millions of dollars out of it and then back in the '90s and the early 2000s it was being worked again and Jason actually worked there you know this is his first place that he went up he worked he learned the skills of being a minor you know drilling blasting mucking refining and it kind of set him on his path to opening Mount Baker mining which you know is his whole job now so it's really cool on the drive out just to hear him recounting how he came into mining how he came into this mine and just the importance of it to him you know I think this adds so much context to something when you understand why somebody's doing something and I fully get why Jason's trying to reopen this mind you know what he's trying to do and that passion is just super [Music] cool eventually you get to the place where there's three little portals that show Jason's mind and I was stoked you know I was very excited to go in learn about it and just experience a little bit of what underground minding would be like because I think that anytime you understand something better you like it a little bit more hi my name is Harry from mine operator I'm up here working with Jason from Mount Baker Mining and metals and we're up here showing these guys around yeah let's go check it out today we're going to find some gold for Brent but this is our old Gold Line it started up about 1900 right about the turn of the last century most of this work was done by hand that's why it's so low so watch your head and they came in here about 75 ft and then right at this intersection you get our first look at the quartz bin so this right here is the the quartz vein that's what carries the gold so there's the hanging wall here and the foot wall is down here and the hanging wall and foot wall don't have any gold at all there's no value there it's strictly in the quartz vein and so it's really really easy to tell if you're an ore because the quartz White and the country rock here is black so black rock is bad white quartz is good but we'll follow this quarts span along for about 500 ft and down in this section of the mine there wasn't a lot of gold they took out the quartz M isn't very rich down here but at the end of this atct we'll climb a raise ladder of about 50 feet and we'll get into the Stope and that's where they did the majority of their Mining and got most of their gold this mine produced somewhere between 5 and 10,000 ounces of gold over 20 15 or 20 years from 1900 to about 1925 and so Jason and Harry's main goal this year was just to rehab the mine you know get new timbering in place get some of the or shoots in place do a little bit of McKing you know get the process down of how they're going to extract ore so next year they can have a big season there was several places along this this drift this lower holway where they did exploratory races up in the vein even if this vein did have gold in it it's just too narrow right here to actually do mining on it's just it's just not economically feasible to mine a 6 or 8 inch wide quartz vein unless it has 10 oz a ton because you have to just to get a person in there to mine it you have to take two or three feet so you're diluting the quartz vein one of the things that we've had to do for safety is some of these raises I was talking about earlier they go up a long way and so just to keep the Mind safe and we don't want to have a bunch of big open holes over our head we've had to Timber off some of these big raises it takes a lot of wood to go mining I found that out I I was amazed at how much wood we've put in into this mine but you just use it for everything ladders lagging stalls support we use we've used a lot of wood this is a spot where they mined down in the vein and that's called the winds when they mine down and because the mine's so wet it's filled up with water but this is kind of a unique place in the in the whole mining District because this is the only place anywhere in the district where someone died and it ended up being a murder the story is is there was they left two guys over the winter to protect the mine from vandals or Claim Jumpers or whatever and the deal was they could take as much gold as they wanted or as they could find to stay over winter and protect the mine and when they came back in in the spring they only found one guy he had a bunch of gold and he said the other guy had gone out hunting a week or two ago and never came back so they sent out search party looked for him they never did find him so they thought well we'll come back start mining when they were pumping out this winds they found that guy's body at the bottom of the Winds with a big rock tied around his neck and the other guy with all the gold taken off and was long gone so that's the only death ever recorded in the mining District got murdered and this was his burial [Music] site I was in here years and years ago and we were screwing around down there trying to get some gold off the floor and it was raining really hard outside and the water was running down here and we were probably 200 ft down the tunnel and I swear to you it sounded like two people were back here talking and you could almost hear exactly you could almost hear the words they were saying but it was just the water falling at the certain raid or pitch or whatever I don't know what the word is but it was the weirdest I've ever felt underground cuz it was like there's someone back there like we're not the only ones in the mine yeah but it was it was very very weird so we had to build this sucker and it was a chore it took a lot of wood took us Harry you remember four days four or five days a total work oh yeah yeah it took us to build this and we ran out of woods I had to go cut down some more trees and Mill up some more wood but we finally got it the ladder goes up about 50 ft I think there's 53 steps and they're they're 12 in apart so there's a ladder on one side there's a shoot on the other and then a kind of a little wall rail in between yeah this was a real a real engineering feat here because there's nothing square there's nothing no no standard distance or anything we were just wedging stalls in and then lagging ladders to them going up and around the corner yeah quite pretty difficult is is very difficult yeah did it have ladders here before they just rotted it away they had ladders here and we pulled some out we use the shoot on our left to slide sandbags down that's how we get our ore out right that's how you're going to get my ore out today Y and this section it's just it's not steep enough to be good for a ladder yeah or it's steep enough that you need a ladder in it yeah so it's it's a difficult section but it's a little awkward so come on up now we're in the transfer way nice so the only reason this little section is here is to get ore from the Stope to the RS there's no ore in here there's nothing it was just make it easier to move the muck around so this is your first look at the sto so we just listen to The Rock that's real solid and sometimes they s real drummy and then it takes forever to scale them so if this one doesn't come right off I'll just let Harry feel in it after we go past but that's what you do is you just walk along the drift and you listen for the sound this is probably the slipperiest spot so watch your footing here and the back is real low so you're going to get a little muddy probably so this is a little bit unusual I haven't been in a lot of Mines with big open stopes like this where they've left pillars to hold up the back it's not a terribly uncommon method but you just don't see it very much cuz a lot of times they won't stay supported for 100 years so they end up caving in but the rock here is so good and so strong and so solici fied that you can have these big spans between these pillars and you still have the the back that holds up together we've quarantined it off or gated it off so you can't just go wandering off and get hitting the head of the rock this rail has been here since they quit in 26 and this is the real stuff this is the real yeah iron rail sleepers and they would run or carts back and forth all day long they used to run the or card down it would dump into the transfer way over the Rays dump into the Rays and then out the way that we came in there were a few spots where they had set old Timbers like right here on your left so this is one of their old stalls and rather than us screw with it we just set a couple on either side but you can see you know compared to your wood in your mind this has been here 100 years pretty W and I can push my finger into it whereas your stuff looks like it was milled 2 days ago but all mines have big Timbers you have some stuff that looks like this y just big big pieces of wood to hold up the world every piece of rock that went out of this mine was hand mucked into or carts and then pushed down the rail and out to the mill so it was a lot of work I've never had as much appreciation for the old miners as I as I have over the last week trying to hand muck that stuff into sandbags it is so repetitive and I like there's just no end you feel like you're going to Muk forever and you never you never go anywhere that's what we're doing today that's what we're doing today that's why that's why you're here and this stuff here on the right is the bigger chunks of ore that we picked out of our Muk pile you get an idea of what the gold or looks like and I'll explain a little bit more about this when we get over to the face so this ore has had two different generations of quartz there's a rusty quartz that has bigger crystals and that doesn't carry any gold but then you have this bright white quartz here on top that has these sulfides running through it and that is where all the gold in our vein is and in some sections you'll have a 7t wide vein and there's only a little area where that that gold bearing quartz is but it's really really rich you can slab this stuff up and the sulfides come through and if there's gold in it it really shows up really really nice so this is is that gold there in the black that is not gold pite that yeah that is an iron sulfide called ptite and it's kind of like py right's cousin it has it's iron and sulur but it's in a little bit different mix than than a pyate cube has but yeah that's in this mind this is a really good indicator that we have gold in this rock but I'll show you some gold my what I say to people is if you think it's gold it's not when you see gold it's like that is gold for sure you there's no mistake in it all right so this is our working pH here behind me and we're in this big open room and the vein outcrops all the way around and the miners left this not because it was didn't have any gold in it but they left it because they had built two or three different Mills outside to Mill the ore and get the gold out but because we have such high snow loads in the winter here their Mill kept getting wiped out by Avalanches year after year and after the third Mill they gave up and they went away so the mine had closed down and there's there were some spots back here that were running two and three and 4 ounces a ton and hopefully today we can find some spots there's a narrow section of the vein that I'm going to show you that is unbel ably rich like dozens of ounces a time but we did a blast along this wall a couple days ago we've got a huge pile of muck so after we're done picking and looking for gold we're going to do a little bit of mck and we're going to work on getting some muck out to the truck and if you're interested in seeing the blast I've got a whole series of videos on me developing the mine timbering the Rays doing the Drilling and Blasting and now mucking so check out my channel if you want to see more okay let's find some gold gold let's find some gold find some gold BS if you look along the vein there's that horizontal line running right through the vein right there right underneath that horizontal line there's that line of sulfides that line of ptite that is where the gold hangs out so as you can see the vein's 3 ft thick here or something there's a little bit of waste we're going to pick right along in here the line comes across back in the back of that hole and right up through here so we're going to just pick along the the face here and hopefully we can find some gold that's the thing you don't want to blast it all over the yeah Stope and lose it so see all that shiny stuff there yeah that is what you're looking for It's Not Gold but it's a good gold indicator it's not like your mind where you knock it off and it's just a Galina you know yeah hand ball size pieces of of mck why can't I find any gold in my gold mine Harry I have something that might help you out oh your your microscope yes sir oh nice I don't want any gold I can see a microscope I'm sorry brother this is how we live down south yeah you can't see the gold with the naked eye where we are yeah there's a little piece of gold there little piece of gold there little baby baby pieces well that's a start yeah let's see if it's got any bigger brothers or [Music] sisters there we go encapsulated in the court right there gold gold we found it we found it there's probably like 800 mag magnification yeah it's right at the tip of my finger right there you can see it kind of glimmer yeah that's good I know this guy that's got this Mill and a Shaker table that will get this no problem you know a guy I know a guy look at that piece dang that is awesome Isn't that cool now I get what you say you know when you see gold so we don't really have this part perfected yet I just want it goes down the slide but the idea is yeah you unload the shoot or the cart you come over here and they go down and make a pile at the next transfer stationing now mining so after we went Mining and we chipped out some gold it was time to muck and McKing in this case is to take the loose Rock You know it's in front of the face that you're Mining and to remove it maybe to refine it maybe just to discard it in this case we were going to refine it and I knew that mucking was pretty low on the totem pole of mining jobs and I can kind of understand why now you basically punch over you fill up a bag full of rocks Jason and harri had constructed this cart that sits on Old rails you put the bag on the cart you push it over you then send it down some shoots and it takes just a very long time after you actually chip out the gold to get it out of the mine it might seem really basic but I think while doing that everything started to clip you know the mine tracks that I see the ore shoots it's all an attempt to get this relatively heavy material out this hunched over crazy like tunnel the whole away and so it's kind of fun to pack up the bag put it onto the cart push the cart over you know throw an or bag down an or shoot see how Jason had constructed his all in the attempts just to get these rocks out of the mine and finally we did you know we took about I think five or six bags out of the mine we need to gym nicely done we need we need track [Music] there you go yep all right so that's mining that's that's how you do it that's in a nutshell that's mining absolutely so with these five bags how much gold you would you anticipate being in these five bags the ore on average is about a dollar a pound and and our bags are anywhere between 30 and 40 lb so we could have $150 to $200 yeah nice something like that in those bags and that's like is that like 10 G I don't know the uh yeah so $200 is about a1th of an ounce so it's about three three G nice yeah roughly and we have I don't think I mentioned earlier we have 40 bags right so I don't know what the math is but it's like you know that's a couple tons I think so maybe there's on a good day $5,000 sitting there in the so ounce and a half or something like that or uh yeah two 2 and a half o and yeah yeah if we have 2 and 1/2 tons now I got to get it down and run through the crusher and on the sugar table and smelt it and right so at the end of the season my goal is to pour a 10 oz bar wow that's what I want I want a 10 oz gold bar at the end of the season well it seems hard even today so I can't imagine how hard it was when they were up here in the 1800s oh yeah yeah everything was by hand they didn't have sandbags I don't know if they had buckets even they were just shoveling from one guy to the next into the OR cart and it was the or cart came down the track and it dumped and someone had to shovel into another or cart and then down and dumped there was probably somewhere between 30 and 50 guys working this mind when it was like really going so it's it's hard to have three of us come up here and like make it it's a lot of work it's just it's just a lot of work the air drill that we use is more or less the same technology they had back then and we're doing everything by hand so we're really doing everything the way they did it so we got all the or back to Jason's shop and I remember it was getting pretty late you know it been a long day Mining and we're all a little bit tired but that was really cool you then I got to learn about the process of refining the gold itself now we're down at Mount Baker Mining and metals kind of demo system here and we run a lot of samples for people through this equipment kind of show them how the Equipment Works test out their samples that kind of thing we've brought four or five bags down from the mine that Brent and I mocked yesterday and now we're going to run them and see how much gold we have it all starts here with this jaw Crusher it's going to take the rocks that we took out of the mine crush them up and it's going to turn the Rocks into gravel the next step is we're going to take those buckets we're going to bring them up here to our caramel and as I dump the stuff in here it's going to break all that stuff up into really fine sand it's going to liberate all the gold from the quartz we're going to run some water down through it so it keeps the dust down and makes a really nice slurry so it comes down onto our third piece of equipment here and the gold as it comes across it's much more dense than everything else so it settles down in these grooves and as the table shakes it bounces the gold across the table here the gold and the other heavy minerals will work their way down across the Shaker table into the number one and the number two concentrates and that will be all the values from our ore concentrated down in just a small amount of stuff so then we can get the gold out a lot easier so let's get this stuff fired up we'll see if we have any gold [Music] well we've worked our gold down into our number one and number two concentrates here and out of those five sacks we got got it down into that much concentrates weighs less than a pound we probably started with about 200 to 250 lb yeah so all of our gold is now concentrated in here and now the real work of getting it out is the smelting and the refining process but now let's go get Brent's gold refined and we'll send him back with a little button all right sun has set and we are going to take that gold you saw come out of the wall of Jason's mine and we're going to get it down to just the gold that's the plan back where we refined a bunch of silver couple years ago now time to make some gold this is a little 4 in by 6 in just a baby little jaw Crusher so it's just like the bigger one just a smaller version so it's going to do the same thing we're going to crush our big rocks down to small size and once they're crushed we're going to run them through a little bit different pulverizer crush them down the whole idea is the same we're trying to liberate the gold from all the quartz and all the sulfides and then we can refine it down to that pure gold button so we're going to start with 16 lb let's see how much gold we get out of [Music] [Music] it you want to take that one with you yeah that' be yeah I think so we're going to move to our second step now this is kind of like a little Grain Mill this is going to take the stuff out of the jaw Crusher crush it up and into a fine sand there's two discs one is one is stationary here and the material comes out the middle and then they just come real close together this one turns and so the stuff goes through the middle and when it gets ground fine enough to come out that little slot all out the [Applause] bottom come come feel this yeah feel how fine it gets oh W it's like powder almost yeah it's like very very fine Rock Dust yeah so now the idea is that all the gold particles are broken apart from the quartz and now we can pan them out it seems to me that no matter how big of a gold mining operation it is I mean huge huge gold mining operations a lot of times it still comes down to panning at the end so here we are we're going to just get out the pan and we're going to pan this stuff down I'll show you how to refine it from there the gold is very very dense compared to the quartz and the other sulfides so as I shake it and get it wet the gold is going to go right down to the bottom of the pan I can wash off the light quartz into this catch Basin I'm not going to throw anything away and actually maybe on a future video I will re-refine my tailings and see how much gold I lost but right now we're going to get this gold out of all this rock flower and then we can get it refined down to a bead so Brent can take it home you know and I have seen gold panning obviously in movies TV shows all sort of things for years I thought it was just swirling around and I can see again why gold is so valuable you know people spend an entire day sitting by the rivered just panning all day just to get tiny Flex tiny flex and Tiny Flex at the very end you know you bring up the pan and you see kind of almost this like half rainbow of gold well here's our here's our first pan this was I don't know a couple handfuls and there you can see the gold in it gold very very fine so there's not it's not a bunch of nuggets it's very small small gold but when there's a bunch of it it really adds up yeah everything yellow in there is gold then you take what I believe is called a Snuffer bottle and a Snuffer bottle basically just like sucks up all the gold from the bottom of the pan so I've got our gold sucked up in our Snuffer bottle here and I can just kind of leak it out into our blue towel here and it acts kind of like a coffee filter so there's some nice gold there there's a lot of gold in there stuff you mind nice work good picked a good spot you picked a good spot we found a good spot there we go this is bismuth okay and uh it's like lead's brother we're going to put a little bit of bismuth in with our gold it's going to alloy with the gold just like with lead then we're going to put it in our furnace and the Bismuth is going to oxidize be absorbed into the cupel just like lead with silver at Zog Gordo right the gold will be left in the cupel after all our business is gone here and so this whole process is going to remove all the base Metals so any copper that's in there any iron that's in there bismuth lead all that is going to go away there's our bismuth in the very bottom right on top of our gold mhm so now I can take our rag all our gold and goodies are down at the bottom here squeeze out last little bit of water and then take my Overkill scissors here cut off the excess this is what I call my my gold packet oh yeah gold gold blob here now let's go put it in our furnace all right this is our celling furnace I run it about 150° F so once that melts off and the Bismuth starts to melt we'll see a silver liquid pool in the cupel and that's the Bismuth melting alloying with all the gold and the Bismuth will oxidize away see the back here any parting words Jason after a couple days of mining yeah it was a great trip I really appreciate it coming up I know it's a long trip for you but I'm really glad we could get some gold at the end and I'm very very excited to see what you do with it thank you yeah after all of that I ended up with this a 10 G bead of pure gold all right so the time in Washington has come to a close it's time to get this truck with all the wood and this gold back to Saro Gordo going to be a long Trek but we got some Precious Cargo and some precious gold you know I I think it was something like4 or $5,000 a ton and it was just an amazing haul this little bead you know as small as you can see is worth something like $600 or $700 worth of gold in this tiny tiny little thing that you see in front of you um which is incredible to think about and now I have to think about what I'm going to do with it if you guys have any ideas I would love to hear because this is pure gold from Jason's mine that I helped mine that now back here at s Gordo if you guys have any ideas let me know below but I just want to say a huge thank you to Jason you know he was extremely generous with this time with this gold you know I don't think that I'll walk through the tunnels again and not look at the timbering and think that was a huge pain to create and so it was a really cool experience and I'm just really excited that I got to know Jason all these years ago and we continue to figure out things to do in the years to come [Music]

Channel: Ghost Town Two

Views: 255,913

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Id: Ojcox00yf9A

Length: 31min 37sec (1897 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2023