Description: GOLD SPECIMEN in SILICATE (QUARTZ) from California, U.S.A. Whether scouring the hills or scoping out ads, I suspect you're on the hunt for wild gold. This piece hails from the Sierra Nevada Mtns. of California. Featured rock contains numerous exposed blebs of naturally-occurring gold. I love looking at this stuff through a pocket lens. My photos show it from different angles and distances. As to be expected from it's appearance, my detector gives off a nice crisp signal. My prices aren't based on how much gold there is but on the fact that it's there. Prospective mineral collectors, rest assured you're buying the real Mccoy. I'm not a 'gold salter'. Please check my feedback for disputes arising from non-authenticity issues. You won't find any. Years spent looking for this villainous metal put me close to plenty. Problem was, it wouldn't move from the ground and into my poke; never enough anyway. Then, when you did find some, you couldn't get much for it. Take a gander at gold prices in the 80s and 90s and that tells you all you need to know. If you did find an ounce and then tried to sell it, guys would offer you 70%-75% of spot. Picture yourself in the year 1985 or 1995. How could anybody make do on $265 for a full season of work in some goldfield. That's implausible, am I right? True enough, everything's relative and today's costs for everything have multiplied several times over prices from twenty five years ago. Still, I'm fairly sure $2600 an oz for gold today would buy you a lot more than $350 would have twenty five years ago. But then, I've not done a statistical analysis. Prior to starting up this e-business, I was a 'lone wolf' placer miner and rustic gold-nugget jewelry designer. Wherever there was gold and claims, you might have found me sluicing, panning, detecting, rocking, drywashing, or dredging. In the arid desert, pick-axes, rockhammers, and shovels (Georgia drag line) were my primary tools. Of course, desert miners use a few more minor accessories in day to day operations. Buckets, gold pans, mortar and pestle - a pocket lens come in handy too. Many folks ask, "Gene, did you strike it rich?" I found nuggets, lots, some weighing over two ounces. While dredging, I hit short stretches of an ounce of gold a day. My best day dry-washing shelled out a 1/2 an ounce. That doesn't sound like much, I know. Youtube legends beat that all the time. Folks, if you think that's a normal slice of a gold prospector's life, it's not. Youtube is a very small sample of the real world. What you see there are the touchdowns, the grand slam swings, the winning soccer goals, the biggest trout in the pool. Youtube shorts reflect success at every turn by people broadcasting their achievements to the entire world. Hey, I joined that crowd a long time ago. You should see all the new song videos I've posted with 50 views in past ten years. Looking back, it's laughable. So I never claimed to be the most successful miner in Gold World, or the greatest songwriter, but so what? No one enjoyed those pursuits any more than I did. Hardly any ex-gold miners (or songwriters) can honestly say they struck it rich unless you were to count independent living as a measure of wealth. I did then and still do today. Did I strike it rich? You bet. (<;. Specimen weight: 7.1 Gram - 109.8 GrainsSize - 22.5X20.4X14.4 mm Ruler (if shown) is 1/4" wide (actual size). A U.S. 10 cent piece is often used to show size of the item for sale. FAST REFUND In case you're unhappy with this specimen, I offer a money back guarantee which includes your initial S&H. With regards to my gold quartz parcels, gold quartz specimens, slabs, and cabochon, I only deal in rocks containing VG (visible gold), not minerals or substances that appear to contain gold or that only assay gold. I think most of us interested in oro (Atomic symbol Au) would like to see authentic, native gold in their specimens; gold that was put there by nature's elemental forces, not by some man's hand. It's an aesthetic we share and that's what I sell - authentic, natural, gold quartz (with VG visible gold). Weight Conversions: 15.43 GRAINS = 1 GRAM 31.103 GRAMS = 1 TROY OUNCE 24 GRAINS = 1 PENNYWEIGHT (DWT) 20 DWT = 1 TROY OUNCE 480 GRAINS = 1 TROY OUNCE S & H Combined shipping offered. For multiple item purchases, please request an invoice (from the seller) when you buy more than one item. U.S. BUYERS S & H is $5.00 (shipped with USPS tracking to all U.S. destinations). Combined shipping offered. ATTN: INTERNATIONAL BIDDERS INTNL. BUYERS S&H - $16.00 (via First Class Parcel) PAYMENTS For U.S. buyers: We accept paypal. For intnl. customers: We accept paypal. Pay securely with www.paypal. Payment must be made within 7 days from close of auction. We ship as soon as funds clear. If you have questions, please ask them before bidding. REFUNDS We leave no stones un-turned insuring our customers get what they bargained for. If you're not satisfied with this item, contact me. Then, if the problem can't be resolved, return product within 30 days in 'as purchased' condition for a full refund (S & H included. For those who know the ups and downs of the precious metals market, this is a heck of a deal. Buy it and if the market drops dramatically in the next 30 days, you can return it for what you paid for it. That's a pretty cool insurance policy for precious metal buyers. I think most specimen buyers, however, are more interested in these rocks for their intrinsic beauty and collectability than they are for their gold content. NATIVE MINERALS Check any and all Gold of Eldorado feedback for disputes arising from non-authenticity of the specimens I sell. You won't find any. I deal in native minerals with visible gold, not replicas, not 'paint-ons'. I don't peddle 'simulated' specimens made with minute amounts of gold or no real gold at all. You won't find salted pay-dirt here that wasn't created by nature. My idea of authentic pay-dirt isn't gold dropped from somebody's hand into a bucket or zip-lock bag of dirt; 'salted' in other words. I was a placer miner priding myself on being able to locate pay-streaks. If I still had mining claims, any pay-dirt offered from them would be direct from the ground; untouched and unadulterated in any other way. Genuine pay-dirt shouldn't need extra gold tossed into it. MY OLD STOMPING GROUNDS THE FATHER LODE, or the Trinity County placer deposits of northern California caused a gold rush in the late 1970s when my baby boomer generation moved in for a piece of the action. Eons before all the hubbub began, erosiona had washed gold-bearing sediments down on an immense scale. In the process, ancient lakes and riverbeds became repositories for gold. Many elevated fragments of these deposits were intact. At first, the 49ers lay seige upon them with picks and shovels. The following generation attacked them with ‘Giants’ (hydraulic water cannons). Using new technologies, mountains of gravel were displaced and the land ravaged. The argonauts were, by this time, fairly thorough. It's rare nowadays for a prospector to find ancient Tertiary or Quaternary gravel-beds anywhere throughout the region. If you wanted to see what remains from an old hydraulic operation, check out the LA GRANGE MINE just west of the Oregon Mountain summit. This empty pit looks very much like the void in the aftermath of a landslide. This huge denuded area rests a few miles from Weaverville on infamous highway 299. That was another lively epoch in the history of U.S gold mining. Mountains of boulders and hundreds of old mining cuts attest to the miner's rigorous efforts. Gold deposits were blasted down over a territory encompassing roughly 50 to 75 square miles. On an equally large scale were the bucket-line dredge operations. These floating beasts tore through local creeks and river-bottoms gobbling up the precious metal found near bedrock. Squeezed in or out amongst these larger workforces were the uncountable minion of small-scale, independent miners. They came rushing in from the four corners of the earth, every cut and color, with picks, shovels, rockers, gold pans, and long toms. Towns sprang up too. The vestiges of a polite society grew out of these gnarly roots of semi-civilized humanity. Over time, miners came to realize that 'while poor men work, a rich man keeps all the gold' (from my song, California Fever). Merchants, saloon-keeps, freighters, painted ladies, and unscrupulous swindlers thrived in the towns and camps. A few hardy argonauts might have struck it rich, but likely as not only a handful. It’s possible that many earned a living off their gold finds though probably not much of one considering the high cost of goods and services. What a colorful era that was. Now, with today's soaring gold prices, look for a whole new breed of adventure-seeker and fortune hunter to go scour those hills and valleys again. You might as well try your hand, mate. Who knows, you might find something bigger than 'a frog’s hair'. So, in the late 1970s, gold briefly hit $1000 per ounce. Because of this dramatic increase in gold’s value, Trinity County crawled with prospectors. I worked the Shasta-Trinity Alps for four seasons. As with any physically-hard outdoor trade, mining comes with it’s own special set of perils. Happily, I survived several of them and lived to tell this tale. Believe me, the four summers I worked there was full of adventure. Initially, the idea of dredging on the bottom of a 30 foot deep river wasn’t all that appealing. It took a bit of bravado, but after accepting fear as part of the challenge; once I had overcome my phobias, working underwater proved exhilarating. Taking the plunge, quite literally, opened the door to many possibilities. It seemed that up-sizing might be the way to go because several of the larger dredges were seeing impressive cleanups. There was a word-of-mouth communication pipeline which kept everyone along the river informed about how well operations were faring. Working a succession of four, five, six, and eight inch dredges, I continued to learn the ropes. When not dredging, I reverted to metal detecting and more-traditional, small scale mining methods like sluicing, panning, dry-washing, even running a rocker box. During that period, the dredging community demonstrated a lot of ingenuity. I saw crews throwing together every manner of prototype imaginable. These bizarre contraptions were assembled on land and shoved into the water. Some of them sank in short order. Everyone was shooting for that big slice of pie in the sky. This was my generation, after all, and we were the gold rush. This included the flock of dreamers who had descended upon us with their crazy, hair-brained inventions. It was amazing to see so much sophistication and lack thereof applied to this job of sucking up gravel from a river bottom. Mining encampments proliferated all up and down the river. Most were connected with a dredging operation somewhere. Not all mining activity, however, was confined to Trinity River canyon and the main river channel. Heading into the hills, I stumbled on makeshift hootches in the remotest places. Many old hydraulic cuts were inhabited by diggers whose goal was survival, plain and simple. What little gold they scraped up amounted to no more than a subsistence, that’s it. Today, we might call that entrepreneurship. How I saw it twenty years ago was ekeing out beer and tobacco money from worked-over ground. Here was a social dynamic not unlike what existed a hundred years earlier. One might have thought this faction of the mining community was nothing but misfits, dropouts, guys on the lam. I found them, for the better part, to be honest, genial fellows; in some cases, just guys down-on-their-luck preferring reclusiveness and subsistence living to menial, low-paying jobs in society's white-collar world. Have you seen God in his splendor, Heard the text that nature renders? You'll never hear it in the family pew. The simple things, the true things, The silent men who do things, Then listen to the wild, it's calling you. Gold of Eldorado 3-10-13
Price: 175 USD
Location: Banks, Oregon
End Time: 2024-11-24T22:43:51.000Z
Shipping Cost: 5 USD
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All returns accepted: ReturnsNotAccepted
Country/Region of Manufacture: United States
