My niece Dijon sent me a bag of sand and gravel. It was from the J.M. Saksa Mine in Montana. She said it is full of sapphires. Well, at the time I couldn’t spot a sapphire if you bounced them off of my head. She told me that the sand also had gold in it and to save it. I started picking out anything larger than a quarter of an inch. I had lots of zip lock bags of
varying sized pebbles. I studied them carefully trying to figure out if it was special or just a piece of rock. Eventually, I learned to spot them. Most, are less than the size of a BB. They are yellow, pink, and blue. They can be used as accents in jewelry and the larger ones faceted and set in rings.
They sat in a box for months, as I had moved on to other things such as faceting and working with silver. Rummaging around looking for something else, I found a couple of bags of the sand and gravel. I figured it was time to clean some of the stuff out, but I wasn’t about to throw it in the trash. I don’t happen to have a gold panning pan, but the little red plastic solo bowls we had in the cupboards were just the right size for panning as I sat watching television. While it was working, kind of, I decided to try a different method. I dug out a quart soda bottle from the recycle bag and with a funnel, I spooned my precious pay dirt into it.
I poked a hole into the bottle near the top and put the neck of the bottle under running water(the water from my fish pond filter). The water washed around in the bottle pushing the light stuff out of the hole I made and settling the heavier stuff toward to bottom.
You can see a few specks in the pictures below. In the first one is a nice flake. It is shown on the other pictures to give you the scale.
Now, this isn’t enough to retire on, but I am already good to go on that count. But it is GOLD! This is just what can be seen and within the sand is quite a bit more of the precious metal. It was mined here in the good old United States of America. So, that makes it special. When you find it and pick it out of the sand yourself, that too, is special. Especially if you are a Miner! The thing is, I have a design in my mind that requires just a tiny bit of gold. So, this may find its way into a piece of custom jewelry. Oh, and all of that sand, well it is still full of sapphires. Work, work, work. No rest for the weary. Life is good.
You can see a few specks in the pictures below. In the first one is a nice flake. It is shown on the other pictures to give you the scale. Now, this isn’t enough to retire on, but I am already good to go on that count. But it is GOLD! This is just what can be seen and within the sand is quite a bit more of the precious metal. It was mined here in the good old United States of America. So, that makes it special. When you find it and pick it out of the sand yourself, that too, is special. Especially if you are a Miner! The thing is, I have a design in my mind that requires just a tiny bit of gold. So, this may find its way into a piece of custom jewelry. Oh, and all of that sand, well it is still full of sapphires. Work, work, work. No rest for the weary. Life is good.