Gold Prospecting in Cargo Muchacho Mtns - LOTSA PICS

Having a good time. Millionaires are often miserable. Poor folks playing stick ball in the street as happy as humans get. You had a load a fun-more power to ya.

The way I heard it was "money does not buy you happiness but it lets you look for it in a lot better places".

Come to Wyoming Jean. I can guarantee gold. Same hard work but there is water and the mountains are green. You still won't get rich though unless, as always, you are lucky.
Jim

Jim, Wyoming sounds nice, but... you forget that I don't handle cold well. It was 47 degrees yesterday morning, and the heater kicked on. Despite the cold start, the high yesterday was 86 degrees. A gorgeous day! Supposed to have the same weather pattern for today, before the high pressure over the four corners breaks down and we cool off a few degrees. I will take this weather everyday I can get it!

Thanks, Tony. Too bad you and your bride will not be making the trip to the North Cadys. We'll catch up with you in Quartzsite in January!

James, the owners of the American Girl Mine are responsible for the large tailings piles, and chopped down landscapes, lol. Not a handful (or a couple handfulls) of recreational drywashers.

The winters in Alabama are a little cold for me, James. If I did go back, say for just a visit, I'm sure my suthun accent would return in no time! But I am a Southern Californian, through and through, that's where I am at home. I am like your wimpy dogs, give me 75 to 120 degrees, and I'm happy. Maybe I need to move to Africa...

No problem, Scott. Funny that you should bring that up. Recently, we had a guy in our prospectors club telling us about gold that he had sluiced from a river in northern California. The gold was contaminated with mercury. He had actually seen blobs/globs of liquid mercury ("quicksilver") in the river!! I'm sure this has come about from the years of miners using it to process their gold, and allowing it to just run off into the river. They had no idea back then how harmful this stuff was, and many were poisoned by it. Made them "mad as hatters."

What you need to safely separate the mercury from the gold is a mercury retort. It is basically a short length of rectangular tubing (2 x 4 x 8 inches), closed off at both ends, with a 3/8" stainless tube running diagonally through it, extending out top and bottom. Steel plate is used to close the ends, and the tank gets sealed up, except for a threaded metal cap (it gets filled with water). At the upper end of the tube is another metal cap, hanging down. You place your mercury/gold amalgam into a metal cup that gets screwed into this. Place a bowl (we use stainless steel) with some water in it underneath the tubing coming out.

You now heat the amalgam chamber up with a torch to just under something like 700 degrees (mercury vaporizes at 675 degrees).  The mercury vapor will leave the gold, and go into the tubing, travleing down the pipe, through the cooling tank, where it returns to a liquid state.  It drops out the end of the tube into the water, where you can recover it.  All of these steps MUST be done outside in a well ventilated area.  You do not operate it when it is windy, or there are other variables that can cause problems.  Never use it upwind of people, or near water supplies.  Theoretically, it should be 100% safe, but you always want to take all precautions.

Okay, now is this what you pictured?


You can Google mercury retort, there are a lot of them for sale online, but they all basically work the same way.  Since you are only going to need to use one once, you probably wouldn't want to buy one.  You may want to get hooked up with a prospecting club. Jean

Thank you Jean! The temperature info is very helpful as well. A bit complicated, but i knew this would not be a simple process. The water in the condensation area makes sense. (I think I was picturing alot of coils like a still). I want to keep the Mercury so i will need to figure out how to construct something like this on the cheap.

First Scott, you're welcome. The mercury will condense inside the tube as it cools, there should be (theoretically) no mercury vapor at that temp to escape to the atmosphere. You will recover all the mercury from the container of water. All the gold stays inside the amalgam chamber. After letting the unit cool down naturally (do not quench!!), you unscrew the chamber, and dump out the gold. Since you did not get it hot enough to melt gold (1948 degrees F), it is not a button yet. You have more work to do.

Put the recovered gold in a crucible, add some borax as flux, and heat it up with a torch. The flux will pull the impurities (any left over black sand, etc) away and you will get your shiny gold button. You may have to hit it to knock the slag off.

Second Scott, yes, I didn't mention that, but we did use cold water (or water and some ice cubes) in the water tank. The outside of the tank was sweating because of the cold.  While this is not essential, I guess every bit helps.  We also left the cap off the water tank after filling it, the better to be able to stick your finger in and check the temp.  It did not heat up when we did it, but I guess if you are doing a large quantity/heating for an extended period of time, it could feasibly warm up the water, and make it less effective at condensing the mercury vapor. 

You do not want the output tube to go below the water. The reason being that when it cools, it can (theoretically) suck water back up that tube into the HOT amalgam chamber. That could be a problem, you do not want to do that. Allowing the liquid mercury to drop an inch into the water is not going to be an issue. For heating, the first time we used it we employed a propane torch, like what you would use for plumbing. An oxy-acetylene torch can also be used.

The most important thing is to use it out-of-doors (not in an enclosed space), where there is plenty of fresh air. A friend of mine found three young men dead in the cab of their truck when they decided to use a retort inside of the truck because it was cold outside.  I would not have liked to have come across that.

What a beautiful golden sunset.

Rich

Woody, there's still lots of old mines there. We were warned by the guy that put this trip on that there were a lot of open holes in the ground. He said he dropped a rock into one, and I forget how many seconds he said it took to hit, but I'm thinking he said it was at least 300 feet deep?

When the area was actively mined years ago, there was no MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration) overseeing things. Some of those miners were so focused on the prize, they didn't always do things safely and took a lot of risks.