Volunteers bring Montana gold mining ghost town to life

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Pictured here is one of the main buildings in Garnet, which has been mostly left untouched since the early 1900s. (garnetghosttown.net)

An old Montana gold mining outpost has gone from ghost town to boomtown.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is giving four history buffs the chance to live in Garnet, a preserved mining town on public land in Montana. But they’ll have to help maintain it and they won’t have the creature comforts of the current century.

“It’s primitive, to say the least,” U.S. Bureau of Land Management Ranger Nacoma Gainan told the the Missoulian. “It’s for people who love the outdoors and want to give back. There’s no electricity, no Wi-Fi and no running water. But there are trails to explore, artifacts to inspect. Volunteers are really left to their own devices after the visitors are gone.”…Read More (FoxNews.com)

Have your own gold mine for $100

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Have your own gold mine for $100 at Indegogo

Gold Mining Tutor: Anyone with a pickup, a pump and a shovel can mine enough gold in a month to pay off their mortgage.

  •  We are the gold mining tutor team Paul, Warren and Larry aka(3 crazy miners)
  • We have discovered a wealth of gold in Utah and Nevada
  •  There are only three things standing in our way. We need your help to raise $15,000 and in exchange we are opening up our gold claims to the public

…$100 contribution you can have shared access on a 20 acre claim. There are an average of 1000oz of gold in each acre. The gold is recovered by skimming the ground a foot at a time with a bulldozer. Then locating the nuggets with a metal detector. This method is being used on the adjacent property where thousands of oz have already been recovered…
Read the full story at Indegogo.com

118 Years Ago Today: Gold Discovered in Yukon

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Skookum Jim Mason Public DomainOn August 16, 1896, an American prospector named George Carmack, his Tagish wife Kate Carmack, her brother Skookum Jim and their nephew Dawson Charlie were travelling south of the Klondike River. Following a suggestion from Robert Henderson, another prospector, they began looking for gold on Bonanza Creek, then called Rabbit Creek, one of the Klondike’s tributaries. It is not clear who discovered the gold: George Carmack or Skookum Jim, but the group agreed to let George Carmack appear as the official discoverer because they feared that mining authorities would be reluctant to recognize a claim made by an Indian.

Klondikers buying miner's licenses at Custom House, Victoria, B C, Feb 21, 1898

In any event, gold was present along the river in huge quantities. Carmack measured out four claims, strips of ground that could later be legally mined by the owner, along the river; these including two for himself—one as his normal claim, the second as a reward for having discovered the gold—and one each for Jim and Charlie. The claims were registered next day at the police post at the mouth of the Forty mile River and news spread rapidly from there to other mining camps in the Yukon River valley.

ChilkootPass GoldenStairs2 by Murdock, G.G.

By the end of August, all of Bonanza Creek had been claimed by miners. A prospector then advanced up into one of the creeks feeding into Bonanza, later to be named Eldorado Creek. He discovered new sources of gold there, which would prove to be even richer than those on Bonanza. Claims began to be sold between miners and speculators for considerable sums. Just before Christmas, word of the gold finds reached Circle City. Despite the winter, many prospectors immediately left for the Yukon by dog-sled, eager to reach the region before the best claims were taken. The outside world was still largely unaware of the news and although Canadian officials had managed to send a message to their superiors in Ottawa about the gold finds and the rapidly increasing influx of prospectors, the government did not give the matter much attention. The ice prevented river traffic over the winter and it was not until June 1897 that the first boats left the area, carrying the freshly mined gold and the full story of the discoveries…Full History (Wikipedia)

California Drought Launches New Gold Rush

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California Gold RushWith rivers low, professional and hobbyist miners uncover more metals.
Brian Clark Howard National Geographic August 14, 2014

COLFAX, California—Bruce Meyer took a smoke break on the gravel bank of the scenic Bear River, deep in central California’s Gold Country. He was wearing a wetsuit and bandana, and water dripped from his thick, graying beard.

Meyer had spent much of the morning on that first Sunday in August hunting for gold in the middle of the stream, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada near Colfax. He showed off several shiny flakes in his pan, each about half the size of a grain of rice. He rinsed them with water and then sucked them into a small plastic bottle.

“Everyone has something they do; mine’s gold,” said Meyer.

Meyer hails from Carson City, Nevada, but he has spent much of the summer staying in his truck northeast of Sacramento to be near California’s rich mineral deposits. And perhaps paradoxically, thanks to the worst drought in the state’s recorded history, his work has gotten a little easier…

“Once you get the fever you’ll have it until you die.”..MORE+Video (NatGeo)

Harry Reid sells house and literal gold mine to move to Las Vegas

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Big News Network (UPI) 10th June, 2014
SEARCHLIGHT, Nev. — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is selling his Nevada estate and its mining claims to move closer to his family in Las Vegas.

Located in Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, the 110 acre property and its eight mining claims were sold to Nevada Milling and Mining for $1.7 million to build a gold-mining operation…MORE (BigNewsNet)

A Canadian Gold Mine Is On Sale For $2 Million In Bitcoin

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Jun. 12, 2014, Nicole Mordant, Reuters

Gold, the hard asset long seen as the ultimate hedge against risk, has fallen so much out of favor in recent years that the owner of a mine in Canada’s historic Yukon gold belt wants to sell the property for $2 million in bitcoin, a virtual currency…MORE (Business Insider)

Gold transforms from molten liquid to gleaming bar

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James Doran Apr 7, 2013 thenational.ae

Watching a bar of gold form before your eyes from molten orange liquid bubbling in a mould to a shiny yellow brick on a dark slab of cold steel, one instantly understands why we prize the element above all others, and why those who could produce it were once considered magicians.

The metal passes through several states as it cools from an almost transparent semi-solid that is so appealing in colour and consistency that it looks almost edible, like caramel cooling into hard candy.

A flawless and brilliant golden surface emerges slowly from this sticky mass until the gold cools completely into the smooth, gleaming bar we covet. The astonishing transformation is so awe-inspiring you can almost hear it.

Monzer Medakka, the managing director of Kaloti Gold, watches this process perhaps hundreds of times a day. What is more, the gold refinery he runs in Sharjah is strewn with the stuff. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold bars, gold sheets formed in electrolysis baths, and bags of scrap gold brought in to be refined.

There is even a large plastic bin filled with gold sand – a remarkable substance that looks and feels like common or garden construction sand but is in fact made of pure gold… >>MORE(thenational.ae)