We Found a Hidden Adit to High Grade Gold at the Golden Griffin Mine! Season 2, Episode 4

We headed back to the Golden Griffin Mine with Dan from @Danhurd, Harry from @mineoperator, Pete from @Standingbearloggingandmore, and Bobby from @HowNOT2 to chase the north vein, test the red “polka dot” hanging wall material, and follow the same ore the old timers were mining more than 100 years ago. This is one of those trips where every part of the claim seemed to tell a different piece of the story — from the old shaft and open stope underground, to the buried drift we uncovered almost accident, to the strange gold signals coming out of rock that did not look like obvious gold ore at first glance.

The main mystery was the red, rusty, speckled material along the hanging wall. At first, it looked like oxidized pyrite, chalcopyrite, iron-stained quartz, and other sulfide-rich material, but the detector kept hitting hard on certain pockets. We started finding the best signs in those little red blebs and “polka dot” zones, especially where the quartz and oxidized material came together. Some pieces looked promising, some turned out to be chalcopyrite or galena, and some still left us wondering whether there was gold locked up inside the structure of the rock.

This trip also took us underground, rappelling into an old shaft where the historic miners had opened up a huge stope following the vein. Seeing that much hand-dug work underground really puts the scale of the old operation into perspective. Those miners removed a tremendous amount of rock with simple tools, working the vein by hand and hauling ore up the shaft long before modern equipment ever touched the claim.

On the surface, we kept chasing the vein and ended up uncovering a small buried east drift by luck. A loose rock kicked out of the wall revealed an opening, and after digging it back, we found that the old timers had driven right into the vein. It only went back a short distance, but it proved the vein continued through that section and gave us more promising material to sample, bag, pan, crush, slab, and eventually smelt.

By the end of the trip, we had a truck loaded heavy with ore, more bags left behind, and several tons of material still waiting for the next run. Coming up, we’ll be crushing this ore, panning concentrates, smelting values, cutting slabs, hunting for specimens, and finding out what the red “polka dot” rock is really carrying.

This is small-scale hard rock mining the way it really happens: dirty hands, heavy tools, dangerous old workings, mystery minerals, detector signals, quartz veins, sulfides, bats, broken rock, and the constant question every miner asks — is there gold in it?

Music in this video:
"Last Canyon" by Lobo Loco, Free Music Archive, CC BY

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Видео We Found a Hidden Adit to High Grade Gold at the Golden Griffin Mine! Season 2, Episode 4 канала mbmmllc