Yukon Gold Prospecting And Testing

hey everyone yukon alley here uh this week's episode i'm going to show you how we prospect for gold on our creek in the yukon and what we do for testing so every spring typically we crash around our creek in the yukon looking for potential hot spots and good places to mine and it usually the roads look something like this in the spring so we have to take our excavator down fix it up eventually because it will be unpassable with the spring creeks roaring so last year we thought as we were traveling around we thought we saw a bench deposit up on the hill here in ancient creek bed so we wanted to see what was in there because it's shallow and it's thawed that's the pros the cons are that because it's on hill there's no water up there so you'd it would be very expensive to um mine it out because you'd have to haul all the dirt down to your plant and it's quite a ways away but here we are with our handy testing vehicle the quad and the trailer and we took multiple samples i'm picking away down in bedrock here i tried to convince my dog to help but he was having no part of it he's on strike or something i'm not sure and that's another story my poor dog titan which i'll tell you about in future episodes but anyways we uh took a bunch of samples here and uh we'll take it back down to camp and run it through this time we didn't find anything so it wasn't worth running but this is typically the kind of things that we'll look for we saw an ancient creek bed and thought hey maybe there's gold up here but yeah and other things we find there's um [Music] there's always crazy stuff up there this next photo coming up is when we were prospecting around in the bush they're walking through and i don't know what this looks like to you but to me it looks like a bigfoot i really wish i would have put my rubber boot next to it to show you just how big it was because you can't really see but it scared the hell out of me when i saw that in the creek in the spring in the mud near the creek and i thought let's get the hell out of here anyways this creek that we're on it was mined out extensively by old timers and unfortunately when you're stripping an area you don't see this until you've dug down to gravel and pater which could be anywhere from 10 to 20 feet down in the creek so that's a lot of work a lot of time a lot of fuel these are shafts they're frozen shafts from the old timers that were in there and when i see those i just want to cry because you just pray they hope laughs left something for you and here's another example alan we were digging one day and he found an intact pickaxe in the cut we were working on here a couple years ago in a shaft and i don't know if you can tell from this picture just how deep it was but we found it about 20 feet down in the creek bed on the cut we were working on it was just insane look at that it looks like brand new in fact we we use it to this day so we're always finding evidence of old timers workings and while it's really cool it's also depressing if they didn't leave you anything so when we first started out we used this keen it was the only thing available in dawson so we bought it for testing and actually we did all our cleanups on that as well until we got a jig but we didn't like how it was manufactured the green matting we don't like and those sorry excuse for riffles i'm sorry but we had to put expanded metal in it and uh we put in the blue miners moss 5 8 inch unbacked because it we find it grabs gold quite good for us and then we um also adapted it so that the water came out the top here and watched the gravel going down as you can see i'm running through a task here i just want to show you what we did to the team to make it work better for us so i'm running the dirt here and this is typically how we do tests and cleanups until we got the jig and this was in the spring so we're just uh running the dirt through here and i don't know if you can see but we like how the water washes from the top a lot and better the expanded metal in that liners moss seems to grab the gold a lot better in our opinion but if you do buy a cane make sure you put a pan underneath like where my bucket is because there's a hole there and i don't know how much gold we lost until we figured that out but every time we do a cleanup there's gold in that pan underneath so as you can see here with the expanded metal you can see and the blue miner's moss obviously it's doing its job because it caught that in our first cleanup of the season there so that was quite nice but that's why we do what we do and then you can see here how the water washes over it and how it catches the gold nicely so that's what we did to adapt the cane and we still use it for testing it's handy it's light it's portable we love it for that reason so last year here you can see this is where the d10 got stuck so this is where we were working last year and this is a week later so we've stripped an area down to gravel because we want to test and see what is worth mining for the year so we're stripping away and you can see the valley is quite narrow so and the old timers were in there the pay streak is very narrow on this creek so as long as you can stay on it your costs stay down if you're not stripping the entire valley and you see what is worth it or not so here we are just trying to get a spot down to pay dirt so we can get the hole in there and dig out a couple test holes so we can see exactly where we want to go and hopefully follow the pastry so there it is we've got this all the overburden off and it's thawing now and we are digging tests we are doing test holes um probably every 20 feet across the valley to see where the best the best gold is and that's the cut i've been showing you pretty much in all the previous videos if you've watched any of them because that's where we were working last year and that was yeah beginning of may i guess there's uh alan and chef lenny doing the first test chef lenny was with us at the beginning of the year and unfortunately he couldn't stay he had to leave for personal reasons and also because he was a friggin bear magnet i swear to god that guy what you think about you bring about chef lenny thought about bears 24 7 and he attracted them like crazy but he was so much fun to have around we love chef lenny so there he is they're just cleaning off the rocks there that have clay bedrock on them doing the test and there's uh me and chef lenny doing another test same day about 20 feet over so we just um we get down to what we call a sweet spot hopefully when we're digging a test hole with the excavator and bring over a bucket full of dirt and in our tasks we do a one yard test which we consider 200 shovelfuls so 200 shovelfuls of dirt will run through the little keen and then we pan it out and see what's there so we know kind of a road map of where we go mining for the year so there we are we're done we've done our 200 shovel fulls and there's alan panning it out rinsing he we rinse out the mats in the pan and then just pan it out in a still area of the creek and hope it's good for all that work you've done even getting it down to a test hole it takes quite a bit so at the end here that's uh what we got out of one of our better tasks so lots of color in there in a one-yard test so we were pretty happy with it and that's how we test and prospect for gold on our creek in the yukon and after a day like that where we're shoveling we're tired because it's a lot of work so typically after a day like that we will have a fire and a beer why do you got a bee there's alan making sure the fire is nice and warm your hair is amazing and that's it thanks everyone i hope you enjoyed this episode of gold prospecting and testing in the yukon have a great week

Channel: Yukon Ali

Views: 242,227

Keywords: #gold, #goldmining, #goldrush, #yukongold, #prospecting, #goldprospecting, #keene, #keenehighbanker

Id: 1ysB93gMtV0

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021