Quartzsite Gold & Lead

 

Our big haul from our gold mining in Quartzsite is what you see in the blue pan.  Small amount but very pretty.  Now if only what's in the other picture was gold.  It is all the lead I have found with my metal detector.  The detector can tell you if its iron or non iron meaning lead and/or gold.  It cant tell the difference between lead and gold.  I have watched U tube videos of how to use my metal detector and if you get good enough you can tell by the slight difference in the sound it makes.  I think I will be digging up a lot more lead before I get that good.

We packed up and left Quartzsite just as it was starting to get really warm.  The weather for the month of April was very nice while we were there.  We still had to go out early in the morning to gold prospect but it wasn't beastly hot by 9am so that was nice.   Now we are in Wickenburg which is about 90 miles east of Quartzsite and closer to Phoenix.  It is a little cooler here because it is at a little higher elevation.  The campground we are staying at is close enough to downtown Wickenburg that we can walk uptown and see the sights.  We  are staying here for a little while waiting for it to quit snowing up by Show Low --our home for the summer.
 

Maquitta Mine

 Where we dig for gold is part of the old Maquitta claims that were part of the Maquitta mine.  Mostly what we are digging in is tailing piles from the mine or surrounding area around the mine itself.  We are finding tiny pieces of gold.  We are hoping that the tailings might have a few bigger pieces of gold that the old miners missed.  Not likely but one can hope.

The mine is still somewhat active and guys live there year round.  There is no electricity or water so it is a little primitive.  They have a large water tank and when it gets really hot most old miners just go down in their mines to stay cool.  It is only April and it is already in the 90's but it does cool down to the 60's at night.  We have been getting up early and heading out to dig before the sun comes up.  When it gets to be 9am the heat comes and you really start to feel it when your shoveling.  This means we only get an hour or so of actual run time on our drywasher so it is amazing that we find any gold.  

Our New Diggings

 We left Yuma a few days before the end of March and headed up to Quartzsite, Arizona.  It is a short 90 mile drive just enough for a shakedown cruise.  Our rig was all clean and shiny from the RV wash service.  It is pretty reasonable to have a rig washed in Yuma and because the tap water is so full of minerals and salt if you wash it yourself you have to wipe it off as fast as you wash it.  Much easier to "pay the guy" who uses reverse osmosis water to do the washing and rinsing.   We also added some cleaner to the holding tanks with some water and let it slosh around on the drive to Quartzsite.  This way it helps loosen crud that may have built up in the tanks from sitting so long.  Our rig is now twelve years old so we need to give it more tender loving care.

When we got to Quartzsite we were excited to get out to the gold claims.  The gold mining club we belong to in Quartzsite added a large new claim so we were anxious to give it a try.   We thought we found a good place to dig in the photo with Jim and his shovel.  He came back out quickly when he realized it was full of  nasty cactus needles.  They were in his shoes and he had gotten some on his gloves.  When we checked closer there was a dead cactus and all of the arms were on the ground blowing around filling the gully up with needles.  So we moved to an area that has piles of dirt that we think are from the nearby gold mine.  It might be dirt they wanted out of the way to get down to the gold veins or it could be tailings that they had run through their equipment.  We have been running this dirt and finding a little bit of gold so we will probably keep at it.