High Cost of Crystalline Gold, Dont sell out too cheap!
 

This week I spent two days at the Northwest Mining Conference here in Sparks. I had a great time. I got a chance to go to the conference through the ICMJ Mining Journal, who was a sponsor. I saw several friends and former co-workers I hadn't seen in 20 years since I worked in the industry. Photo one shows the conference entrance. This is really a conference made for the full size commercial / industrial mining industry, but never fear there are always a few of us individual prospectors around! I have known of gold specimens beng sold around for a number of years that are marketed as coming from the "Mad Mutha" mine. Well, I finally got to meet Mr. "Mad Mutha" himself. He uses a GP Extreme and and a Gold Bug II metal detectors to find gold. The gold he produces is very spongy, the kind of stuff that PI detectors sometimes have a bit of trouble with sometimes. Photo 2 shows some of the gold he markets, but this specimen is not from the Mad Mutha claim, its from another of his claims, but it is of the same type. Take a look how spongy it is. The crystals are small, and for crystal gold it is cheap for crystalline material, only about $1240 per ounce!

I also saw some other specimens offered by other folks. I wanted to post these so you all could see how expensive nice crystal gold is going for.

Photos 3- 5 are from the Eagle's Nest mine in Placer County. The specimens are made by treating high grade gold quartz with Hydrfluoric acid to etch away the quartz. The price on No. 3 was a bargain $4,500. I would estimate it contains about 3/4 or an ounce of gold. No. 4 is $1500 and probably has about 2 dwt of gold - I saw that it did sell at the conference. The specimen in No. 5 has a spray of gold around 3 inches tall, and probably does have 2.5 to 3 ounces of gold. It was for sale at the bargain price of $14,000.

Photo no. 6 is a nice but small pice of Chevron gold from Rye Patch. I'd estimate it at around 3 to 3.5 dwt. The $850 price works out to just around $5000 per ounce. IT SOLD at the conference. Dang, if I could get $5000 per ounce, I'd probably sell my gold, too.

Photo 7 is a small piece from the big mine at Round Mountain. It has little quartz, is mostly gold and weighs in 8.8 grams. The gold is high in silver probably not more than about 80% gold by weight. Price per ounce for this little crystal nugget is a measly $4400 per ounce.

Photo 8 is a piece from the big mine at Round Mountain. I'd guess it has less than a quarter ounce of gold, the rest is rock. Total weight is 28 grams. Price, as you can see is $2500, so you are talking about roughly $10,000 per ounce. Again, I'd happily sell all my gold for $10,000 per ounce!

Anyway, the lesson here is to not underestimate the value of nice crystalline gold specimens and the specimens that can be created out of higrade gold-quartz by those with tools, talent and a few quarts of Hydro Fluoric acid.

Just a disclaimer: HF acid can be very dangerous if mishandled.

Chris

Re: High Cost of Crystalline Gold, Dont sell out too cheap!
 

Is Gold like this pure or dose it need to me refined and refined.

Electric-Amish

Re: High Cost of Crystalline Gold, Dont sell out too cheap!
 

Re: High Cost of Crystalline Gold, Dont sell out too cheap!
 

On all of these nuggets / specimens the gold is as it was dug from the ground, but the material around the gold is removed you you can see the gold better. On the Rye Patch single nugget, that piece is as it came out of the ground, only washed with water, thats it.

Re: High Cost of Crystalline Gold, Dont sell out too cheap!
 

Nice photos Reno Chris, thanks for the look. Nice post.

Re: High Cost of Crystalline Gold, Dont sell out too cheap!
 

I second that. Great pictures. Thanks.

LG :cool2:

Re: High Cost of Crystalline Gold, Dont sell out too cheap!
 

"Pure gold is virtually non-existant in nature. High quality native colors are 22-23Kt (roughly 91-96%) pure. And by far most gold was formed in particles so small that they can't be seen by the human eye, and most gold was formed as non-free milling, which means it is chemically bonded with other minerals...like sugar disolved in water: it's there but you can't pick it out.

For a visable color to have been formed many many liquid micron particles had to be located together when they solidified. And to have formed a "nugget" (any color that won't pass through a 10-mesh (10 holes per linear inch) screen [ a window screen is 18-19 mesh], probably millions of these particles had to be located together. This is why visable gold is rare, and nuggets are far more rare. Fact: more diamonds are found than gold nuggets.

Anyway, specimen gold (gold still in the matrix [rock, usually quartz] in which it was formed, is exceedingly rare and a nugget of the size Chris is talking about is only seen in most prospector's dreams.

Nuggets are highly collectable and one thing that drives the price is that virtually all of 'em found before 1990 were melted for assay to determine the value of the gold they contained.

Great pics Chris; thanks. We find occasional specimens here in the east but their rare. The largest I've found is encrusted in an ugly (highly mineralized) brown/orange/green/black piece of quartz about 1.5 x .75" with about 1.5 dwt color.

Re: High Cost of Crystalline Gold, Dont sell out too cheap!
 

Those are beauties! Thanks for posting the pics. There is quartz containing gold chrystals in the mountains in western Ireland, and I've aalways wanted to go prospecting up there. An old timer showed me a few he had, and he heated them in the fireplace, crushed them, and then panned the gold out. Now that I've seen what you can do by disolving the quartz with HCl, I can't wait to go out and find some of my own. I've never prospected, I metal detect and would love to hear some tips for locating gold in quartz deposits.

Re: High Cost of Crystalline Gold, Dont sell out too cheap!
 

Beautiful pictures Chris, I had wondered what was meant by talking about crystalline gold. Most of these are very simular in form to many of the copper nuggets I have detected and dug in the UP of Michigan. Have about 70 pounds of those that I have collected over the years, up to 125 ounces of copper with maybe a quarter ounce of silver crystals on the outside[what is called here a "hybred"], for my largest. Was not even knowledgeable about micron gold when I was looking around the old gold mines up there near Ishpeming and so I probabally walked right past some gold looking in vain for something I could see. Michigan's ground is so covered by glacial till that it is hard to find bedrock exposures to do any prospecting on, but one good mine, the Ropes, was developed in the late 1800's a couple of miles north of Ishpeming that produced 3 million ounces; so there is a chance of finding some here.