GYMPIE HIGH GRADE GOLD QUARTZ SPECIMEN 3.8 GRAM GOLD AND QUARTZ

Description: NATIVE GOLD QUARTZ SPECIMEN from QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA Ruler is 1/4" wide (6 mm). U.S. 10 cent coin is 17 mm in diameter. Specimen weight: 3.8 Grams - 59.9 Grains Size: 22.1X15.3X10.4 mm Intruded with precious metal, quartz becomes highly collectible. Now you've entered the mystical realm of GOLD! This specimen is mostly wall rock, possibly grey dolerite. The quartz capping one end is clearly defined as is, hopefully, the golden presence. Miners don't often luck onto filthy-rich pockets, veins, or even isolated float rocks which show visible gold. Some mines like the Gympie-Eldorado contained massive vein systems flush with bonanza ore. True high grade such as this doesn't require a pocket lens to see the gold, however, it's always a treat to look at magnified. While you're at it, you might wish to study the mineral host itself. What you see as brilliant gold is the product of naturally-occurring mineralization. It originated in a historic, eastern Australia hard-rock operation - the famed Gympie-Eldorado Mine located beneath the town of Gympie. I don't sell low grade ores. My wares consist of naturally-occurring gold quartz with visible gold. These high-grade beauties are expensive to obtain and even harder to find. Prices aren't based on the amount of gold, but on the authenticity, rarity and collectibility of my specimens. U.S. SHIPPING - $4.00 (includes USPS tracking to all U.S. destinations) INTERNATIONAL CUSTOMERS S&H $16.00 FAST REFUND OFFERED (If, for any reason, you're not happy with this item) For years, I poured through old mining dumps with my pocket lens. Within the countless rock piles encountered, I observed every color of the rainbow; white, orange, yellow, red rust, black, burnt, cindery-looking rocks. Anything which showed promise was examined. In all that time, I never found one solitary piece with visible gold. That still seems remarkable given the law of averages and the sheer number of rocks involved. Granted, when you've a rich claim, finding gold can seem easy. Having gold stare you in the face every day is quite a luxury. Most small-scale artisanal miners will tell you a far different story. Long ago, they reached the same conclusion as me. "There's no easy ounces!" That's the reality. Yet, having spent years in the trade, I believe a person stands a better chance today than ever before of locating a paying gold deposit. Twenty five years ago, no one forsaw gold increasing by six or seven times. Knowing that, who in their right mind would have sold their finds? Problem is, when your beans play out, you do what you must. Jumping ahead, conditions couldn't be better for mining. All it takes is time, determination, the right tools, hard work, good luck, access to good claims, and favorable regs allowing a prudent man to mine. Super-heated hydrothermal solutions, associated with volcanic activity, carry dissolved gold along with silica. Under intensely-high pressure, this aqueous mixture fills natural fissures and faults. Contact alteration zones act as interfaces between larger rock formations. Oftimes, contacts become the recipients of metals carried by the hot waters. Dissolved minerals like gold, silver, copper, lead, et al, as they cool, crystallize and harden into veins, sills, dikes, ledges, etc. The same principle applies to much larger geological formations. Contact zones are ideal areas for prospectors to hone in on. If canyons, creeks, rivers, arroyos, et al drain and carry alluvial material away from these contact zones, a prospector/miner may be in business. Weight Conversions: 15.43 GRAINS = 1 GRAM 31.103 GRAMS = 1 TROY OUNCE 24 GRAINS = 1 PENNYWEIGHT (DWT) 20 DWT = 1 TROY OUNCE 480 GRAINS = 1 TROY OUNCE S & H Discounted for combined shipments. U.S. BUYERS & INTNL. PAYMENTS For U.S. buyers: We accept paypal For intnl. customers: We accept paypal. Pay securely with www.paypal. Payment must be made within 7 days from close of auction. We ship as soon as funds clear. If you have questions, please ask them before bidding. REFUNDS We leave no stones unturned insuring our customers get what they bargained for. If you're not satisfied with this item, contact me. Then, if the problem can't be fixed, return product within 30 days in 'as purchased' condition for a full refund. MY OLD STOMPING GROUNDS Sometimes called THE FATHER LODE, the placer deposits of Trinity County caused another gold rush in the late 1970s. That's when miners from my era moved in for a piece of the action. Eons before any real digging had begun, erosion washed gold-bearing sediments down on an immense scale. In the process, ancient lakes and riverbeds became repositories. Many elevated fragments of these old deposits were stranded. At first, the 49ers attacked them with picks and shovels. The following generation lay seige to them with ‘Giants’ (hydraulic water cannons). Using new technologies, mountains of gravel were displaced and the land ravaged. The argonauts, being hungry for gold, were fairly thorough. It's rare for a prospector nowadays to find ancient Tertiary or Quaternary gravel-beds in the region. If you wanted to see what remained from an old hydraulic operation, check out the LA GRANGE MINE just west of the Oregon Mountain summit. This empty pit rests a few miles from Weaverville on infamous highway 299. That must have been quite the lively epoch with so many gold-seekers traveling about digging up all the gold-bearing gravel they could find. Mountains of boulders and hundreds of old mining cuts attest to the miner's rigorous efforts. Gold deposits were blasted down or dug up over a territory encompassing roughly 50 to 75 square miles. Bucket-line dredges also tore through local creeks and river-bottoms gobbling up the precious metal found near bedrock. Squeezed in or out amongst these larger workforces were the uncountable minion of small-scale, independent miners. They came rushing in from the four corners of the earth, every cut and color, with picks, shovels, rockers, gold pans, and long toms. Towns sprang up too. The vestiges of a polite society grew from these gnarly roots of half-civilized humanity. Over time, miners discovered that "while poor men work, a rich man keeps all the gold" (from my song, California Fever). Merchants, saloon-keeps, freighters, painted ladies, and unscrupulous swindlers thrived. A few hardy argonauts might have struck it rich, but likely as not only a handful. It’s possible that many earned a living off their gold finds though probably not much of one considering the cost of goods and services. What a colorful era that was. Now, with today's soaring prices, look for a whole new breed of adventure-seeker and fortune hunter to scour the same hills and valleys all over again. You might as well try your hand. Who knows, you might find something bigger than 'a frog’s hair'. So, in the late 1970s, gold briefly hit $1000 per ounce. Due to this dramatic increase in gold’s value, Trinity County crawled with prospectors. I worked the Shasta-Trinity Alps for four seasons. As with any physically-hard outdoor trade, mining comes with it’s own perils. Happily, I survived several and lived to tell this tale. Believe me, the four summers I worked there was quite the adventure. Initially, the idea of dredging on the bottom of a 30 foot deep river wasn’t so attractive. It took some daring-do, but after accepting fear as part of the risk/reward equation; once those feelings were overcome, working underwater proved exhilarating. Taking the plunge, quite literally, opened up new opportunities for me. Up-sizing to a larger dredge seemed the way to go since so many big dredges were seeing impressive cleanups. There was a word-of-mouth communication pipeline which kept everyone along the river informed about how well operations were faring. Working a succession of four, five, six, and eight inch dredges, I continued to learn the ropes. When not dredging, I reverted to metal detecting and more-traditional, small scale mining methods like sluicing, panning, dry-washing, even running a rocker box. During that period, the dredging community threw together every manner of prototype imaginable. I saw some bizarre contraptions assembled on land and shoved into the water. Some sank in short order. Everyone was after their slice of pie in the sky. This, after all, was a gold rush, so a whole flock of Rube Goldbergs had swooped in with their crazy inventions. It was amazing to see all that sophistication and lack thereof applied to this job of sucking gravel up from a river bottom. Mining encampments proliferated all up and down the river; most connected with a dredging operation somewhere. Not all mining activity, however, was confined to Trinity River canyon and the main channel. Heading into the hills, I would stumble onto makeshift hootches in the remotest places. Many old hydraulic cuts were inhabited by diggers whose goal was survival, plain and simple. What little gold they scraped off the already-pummelled bedrock amounted to no more than a subsistence. Today, we might call that entrepreneurship. Thirty five years ago, I viewed it as ekeing out beer and tobacco money from worked-over ground. Here was a social dynamic not unlike that which existed a hundred years earlier. One might conclude this faction of the mining community was nothing but misfits, dropouts, guys on the lam. I found them, for the better part, to be honest, genial fellows; maybe guys down-on-their-luck preferring a reclusive life in the woods to society's high cost of living and condescending attitudes. Thanks for checking out our digs. Gold of Eldorado 1-14-13

Price: 50 USD

Location: Banks, Oregon

End Time: 2024-11-22T20:40:21.000Z

Shipping Cost: 4 USD