How would you mine?

So I have awoken from my slumber and seek advice of old prospectors and alike. If you had the opportunity to mine with detectors or a sluice with a excavator how would you work a old sluiced area ? That is a area that’s been cut into the hill and lots of round rock stacks everywhere? Would it be fruitful to spread out the old tailings and detect it? I’d love to know your thoughts.

Lots of questions here.
Do you plan to claim or lease this site and what size?
Does it have a history of nuggetty gold?
How rich was the area?
Do you have access to water and how much?
What equipment do you have access to?
How do you plan to sample the ground?
Is there an existing EL over this site?

These are just some of the questions you need to answer before you can progress.

Good questions. What if it was one of those sights that was hydraulic sluiced? Would it be worth going through all the tailings in the big cut?

You would need to do sampling to see what was missed, but research is imperative. What did they get when first worked. Did they work rich, or marginal ground. Do not put the cart before the horse.

The rocks were picked out of a sluice already presumably washed of adhering clay and placed in piles. Maybe some gold left but already washed doesn’t sound too promising.
Also the sluiced ground would have been washed down to bedrock level so not much likely left there either. It might look like a clay bottom but really it is most likely decomposed bedrock. In a way such areas should more properly considered “surfaced”, maybe a little gold sunk down into cracks or softer parts but nothing worthwhile below that.
The difference between such areas and an old worked lead is that in an old lead worked by shafts much often good paydirt was left behind either as pillars, pushed to one side, or just plain missed in the difficult conditions underground. Reworking those with modern machinery can be worthwhile.
In hydraulically sluiced areas ALL of the paydirt above bedrock was worked.
Maybe worth hand spreading an old rock pile to see if there is something detectable underneath or working the edges but if there is an exception to the old saying “They didn’t get it all” the closest might have to be in an hydraulically sluiced area.
Only an opinion never having found more than a few small bits in the middle of sluiced areas.

Yeah good thinking. You might find a few odd sub gramers after spreading all that rock and gravel. Might have made more money selling it for road base or something This is of course hypothetical, we can all dream. What about deep lead mullock heaps? Say 20 metres down? Ever the big machines would struggle to strip mine that depth. My guess a little 1.8 tonner that scratches the mullock heaps would be the go there?

Even in shallow workings the heaps that you see are mostly overburden ie worthless dirt overlying the true washdirt which might be only a few inches over the bedrock. Each heap you see might therefore compose a small amount of bottom on the top with the remaining 99% underneath being the most likely barren overburden. Despite this many of the old workings have already been spread out and detected but with varying results.
If you have watched "Aussie Gold Hunters" on TV and the Posiedon and German Gully crews at work, you will get a sense of what is needed to work deeper leads. Even the leads these crews are working might best be described as "shallow" as they were worked by diggers shafts. 
True deep leads can be up to 100 feet deep, worked by large companies, and now marked at the surface by super large mullock heaps. Unfortunately most are on private property and probably not accessible. I know of a few on public land but have never detected any gold in them but have panned off buckets to reveal fine gold.
Probably about all I can comment.

Yeah most of the detectable gold would be taken already I agree. Speaking of Aussie gold hunters I’m pretty sure it’s all staged or mostly staged. What happened to catos paddock? Did they really sell their other claim with all the machinery just to mine this so called nugget patch? Has anyone driven past their old claim and is it still being worked? So many questions about these “reality” shows.

I think Catos paddock would be coming up in the latest series. Legendary goldfield and having cast my eyes over it many times, am really interested to see what they find.
Yeah reality shows have to be staged. I remember watching a Meteorite Men episode when they were in the Australian Outback and caught in a downpour and bogged. Everyone had to chip in to get the vehicles out and the scene showed about a crew of six working behind the scenes.
Not sure that gold hunters would have that many but getting good footages requires expertise in film production and reality says you can’t have too many paid filmmaking people hanging around behind the scenes on a about six different locations waiting maybe weeks to document good finds.
I still enjoy watching the show because the gold is certainly real, plus it saves me having to go to bed to dream of finding gold.

Yeah staged like digging up ounces of gold on top of a random hill one day with plenty of cameras around in Victoria lol.

Not to mention how clean a lot of those nuggets are, despite having been supposedly buried for so long.

In relation to mining, you would need a decent bankroll or decent funding partner to get all the equipment, lease costs, Govt application costs (thats even before & then if they allow you to mine).
Then there are fuel & ongoing maintenance costs to factor in, so the returnas need to be pretty good.

A good example was the German Gully applications that were declined. As Mick Clark & Neville Perry just vanished off the show, I expect all the $$$ they sunk into applications & buying the land saw the Govt say no under heritage laws. Does anyone know what really happened?

They've been working Cattos paddock for a few months now. Don't know about Poseidon. I don't like their chances at Cattos, as, if it was so rich the old miners would have shored it up with logs taking away all the good wash. If it wasn't so rich they would have left original earth pillars to support the roof as they tunnelled along the lead. I know a guy who dozed an old lead in Kingower, which still had the earth supports
in it. He said the only gold they got out of the whole lead was in the earth pillars. Maybe Hazeldines poultry farms have bought the Poseidon paddock, as they bought all the land there except for that paddock which was bought before the auction of the Poseidon farm and land.

I’m very interested in their chances at Cattos. Rheola for much was a very interesting goldfield with some of the best areas laying on granite bedrock. Apparently many vertical feet of the slates in which the gold reefs formed had been completely eroded away leaving their detritus and gold laying directly on the underlying granite. From reports this granite bedrock was much decomposed and turned into a sort of clayey pug. This was in contrast to leads in other places where the washdirt often rested on a hardish or easily identified bedrock.
A quote from geologist Bradford in 1903 on the richness and nature of the ground reads as follows.
“One nugget weighed about 143 lbs, one about 90 lbs, one 74 lbs, one 60 lbs, one 40 lbs, one 18 lbs and so on. As usual these nuggets were compatibly few and far between.  The puggy nature of their bedding and in some instances the coating of manganese which gave some a very dark colour, led to many being thrown out in the headings heaps”
The nature of the ground gives hope that maybe more are still waiting to be unearthed and possibly the heavier ones still as just maybe they had more weight to sink them further into the soft clayey decomposed bedrock.
Good luck to them.
Edit 1 Troy pound equals 12 Troy ounces so the 143 Pound nugget would be 1716 Troy ounces. I understand what they are looking for and I’ll be watching.

I’m waiting for the rest of the Aussie gold hunters season to air. They just kind of vanished after 12 episodes. Probably running out of stages things to do. You can only pull the waiting for permits to come through card so many times. But than they just plant stuff in the wild and makes all the newbies think they can just go buy a detector and go to the remotest part and pick up a few ounces. It’s kind of stupid to sell the Poseidon lease because they still had life on that mine and a regular flow of work. But fatso is greedy and just follows some dream just like Todd Hoffman. That’s why I think it’s all staged just for views.

hawkear wrote:I’m very interested in their chances at Cattos. Rheola for much was a very interesting goldfield with some of the best areas laying on granite bedrock. Apparently many vertical feet of the slates in which the gold reefs formed had been completely eroded away leaving their detritus and gold laying directly on the underlying granite. From reports this granite bedrock was much decomposed and turned into a sort of clayey pug. This was in contrast to leads in other places where the washdirt often rested on a hardish or easily identified bedrock.
A quote from geologist Bradford in 1903 on the richness and nature of the ground reads as follows.
“One nugget weighed about 143 lbs, one about 90 lbs, one 74 lbs, one 60 lbs, one 40 lbs, one 18 lbs and so on. As usual these nuggets were compatibly few and far between.  The puggy nature of their bedding and in some instances the coating of manganese which gave some a very dark colour, led to many being thrown out in the headings heaps”
The nature of the ground gives hope that maybe more are still waiting to be unearthed and possibly the heavier ones still as just maybe they had more weight to sink them further into the soft clayey decomposed bedrock.
Good luck to them.
Edit 1 Troy pound equals 12 Troy ounces so the 143 Pound nugget would be 1716 Troy ounces. I understand what they are looking for and I’ll be watching.

Spent a lot of detecting time around Rheola many moons ago and I feel sure that if there are any big nuggs still to be found in the Triangle it will be in and near the low hills around this area. I found it to be very interesting detecting on and around those hills... But as I said, it was a long time ago.

cut away and sluice/dry blow surface gold if i had a choice. Cheap and profitable, not too much outlay or physical risk.

hawkear wrote:I’m very interested in their chances at Cattos. Rheola for much was a very interesting goldfield with some of the best areas laying on granite bedrock. Apparently many vertical feet of the slates in which the gold reefs formed had been completely eroded away leaving their detritus and gold laying directly on the underlying granite. From reports this granite bedrock was much decomposed and turned into a sort of clayey pug. This was in contrast to leads in other places where the washdirt often rested on a hardish or easily identified bedrock.
A quote from geologist Bradford in 1903 on the richness and nature of the ground reads as follows.
“One nugget weighed about 143 lbs, one about 90 lbs, one 74 lbs, one 60 lbs, one 40 lbs, one 18 lbs and so on. As usual these nuggets were compatibly few and far between.  The puggy nature of their bedding and in some instances the coating of manganese which gave some a very dark colour, led to many being thrown out in the headings heaps”
The nature of the ground gives hope that maybe more are still waiting to be unearthed and possibly the heavier ones still as just maybe they had more weight to sink them further into the soft clayey decomposed bedrock.
Good luck to them.
Edit 1 Troy pound equals 12 Troy ounces so the 143 Pound nugget would be 1716 Troy ounces. I understand what they are looking for and I’ll be watching.

So after watching the rest of the season what they found at catos paddock so far and reading your comments, I reakon it would be a good idea to detect the bottom of the hole, even digging a foot deeper into the decomposed bed rock just in case there was a heavy nugget that sank into it. Also strip the top 6 inches or so amd detect because apparently they threw out a lot of nuggets that were dark in colour due to being coated in magnesium. Where ever these “header” piles were. Obviously the land has been reclaimed by farmers to an extent. If a header pile is just a tailings pile than it could of been taken away for fill or just pushed over to farm. I know there was a water resavior that got built on the early 90s and they trucked in old mullock heaps from all over the place to make the dam wall. Who knows how much gold is on that dam wall now