Gold and Mercury

WOW! Gold is up to $788.40 this morning and has been advancing since the spot market opened yesterday afternoon! Has anyone been finding gold recently? We have seen some nice gold still coming out of the Cache Creek area and the Leadville area. Speaking of Cache Creek, there has been mercury found in a couple of areas there, so be aware that it is there. Mercury is known to exist in the area naturally, as it was used heavily in the past. You will find it in abundance at the end of the old sluices, so if you get into some lose sand that shouldn't be where it is, you may find mercury in your cons. Gather it all together and put into it's own bottle. Keep water on it, too, as it gasses off at a low temperature. If you put into your bottle with clean gold it will foul the clean gold when it comes into contact with the mercury. We keep ours separate until we have enough to take to someone who knows how to properly handle mercury to have the gold recovered. If you are thinking of processing it yourself, be advised that one WHIFF of nitric acid will make you deathly ill for 2 weeks, OR WORSE, from nitric acid poisoning! You CAN DIE from inhaling the stuff, so be very careful!!!!!! We prefer to take our small amount to a professional. It simply is not worth your life or health. Could we do it ourselves? Sure, but why risk it. It might be more interesting to just keep it in a bottle to talk about. We have had ours for about 5 years, now, and add to it most years. When will we take it to process it? Oh, maybe when we fill the bottle. It is about half full now, so maybe in another 5 years. Maybe not. If mercury covered a BIG nugget, we would probably consider it then. The other thing is that once gold has had mercury on it, it never seems to come back to it's original color after it is processed. The silver gets extracted along with the mercury and leaves it a duller color, if there is copper in with it. Copper is the most frequently found metal combined with gold, so it is highly possible your gold will have the brownish color of a gold-copper combination after it has gone through the mercury cleaning process.

Rockies got swept last night. Bummer, but they DID come a long way to even BE in the World Series. The 8 days off didn't help, either. However, we won't make excuses. The Sox pitchers and hitters were spot on all four games, and ours were not. Hitters seemed to finally get back in the groove by the end, but the pitching was less than stellar. Watch out NEXT year!!!

Gold Tops and Plunges

Dreaming of Summer Prospecting



HMMMMM. PDF files are tough to load on a website. No matter. The first page of the new catalog, along with the new page template, should go up in a couple of days. Pay with PayPal.

Not much going on with gold right now. The usual selling and buying of mining companies continues to go on while the gold mining industry consolidates its energies. Are you watching gold? Kitco has the taskbar download on their page, so get one for minute by minute updates of the prices of gold, silver, and platinum at kitco.com. If you don't preview this site at least once a month, you are really missing out on a lot of information. Gold touched just above $772.00 before plunging below $748, yesterday, before settling back around $752. Today, buyers are pushing the price back above $757. It's likely a good bet that some bank dumped a bunch of the metal after it hit $772 to cause the sudden drop.

Had to turn the furnace on this morning for a shot of heat. Even though it will be in the 70's later today, it was a bit chilly at 62 degrees. A power plant outage and 6 - 9's has us without much time to hunt for gold in October. BUMMER! BUT, we are talking with friends and making plans for the gold areas we will look at next summer.

GO ROCKIES!!!!!

Hooked on Gold Website changes

2 Days Work at Cache Creek this summer


Did the wind blow at your house today? It sure is here! Gold is slipping up past $766 after sliding back around $755 yesterday. Wasn't it just last month it was around $650? An accidental break through on my webbuilder yesterday has me wizzing through pages and building the new template a lot faster than I was. Boy, am I glad that headache is over. I found the path purely by accident, and am amazed that the instructions did not include this tid bit of information. Anyway, I should be able to build about 3 pages a day until I get to the forms and picture albums.

GO ROCKIES!!!

The store part is started and I need to add the pay pal buttons. You should get to see the new template on that page next week with a few catalog items on it. It will appear as a subdomain of hookedongold, so don't be confused when the look of the page changes. You can e-mail me and let me know what you think of it when it goes live. The new template should also solve the problem of the page being too wide. I have no control over that with the present template, and is one of the main reasons I am changing it again for a new look.

GO ROCKIES!!!!

EVERYONE is wanting to get back up to the mountains and get some more gold before it gets too nasty. We have had snow in the high mountains this past week for a total of around 20 inches already. The ski resorts are jumping up and down, and they all had ONE RUN open with man made snow on it last weekend. Only a few are open for skiing, however. Oh, did I mention.....

GO ROCKIES!!!!
(For those of you who live in a cave, our own Rockies baseball team will be playing in the WORLD SERIES next week)
GO ROCKIES!!!!

We are making prospecting plans with friends for Thanksgiving week. Even if it snows, we can go prospect the casinos in Blackhawk. I never did like shopping with the crowds the day after Thanksgiving and have most of my shopping done by then. Well, time to go build another page or two. Get those cons cleaned up. I want to know how much gold you found this summer.

A Golden Rocktober

Snow in Gold Country


Did you see gold's spot price this morning? It has been fluctuating between $757 and $760!

We had a conversation with the BLM head this morning about Cache Creek. FYI! There MAY be another spot opening up for prospectors in the near future. Can't say anything right now, but we have prospected this area, and there is some very good gold to be found here, too! While we were prospecting Cache Creek we did find several interesting areas that the BLM will consider opening in the future. For now, enlarging the parking lot, keeping the road repaired and toilet facilities are on the top of their list.

Our golden Rocktober is shaping up nicely for the Denver Rockies, who won last night's third game by a score of 4 to 1 against the Diamondbacks! Me thinks their "snakepit" has a mongoose lose in it. LOL! We had rain and drizzle in the city most of the day, and the game was played in drizzle to moderate rainfall. On a side note, those of you who ventured up to Cache Creek may have had a surprise of snow, as the storm came in about half a day earlier than expected. Some of the northern mountains got as much as a foot of the white stuff. Today's possible "sweep" game is a late one, and we probably will not be able to stay up for the last pitch to see who wins. I almost missed Torealba's homer to bring 3 runs in last night, dozing off!

Got any prospecting or metal detecting stories? Blog back at me. Others would like to know what you do, too.

Gold and GPOC's new board and club dues increase

RAINBOWS We all know that the rainbow ends in Colorado, but did you know that they both do?

So are you watching gold blow through $750 today? I've been doing computer cleanup for hours, now, and have been watching it steadily climb from $740 yesterday.

Gold Prospector's of Colorado October meeting is for the election of officers and they have retained, basically, the same board they had last year. "New" officers will take over January 1st. The club is still looking for a treasurer, so any of you GPOC members out there that have accounting skills can still step up and do your duty.

The attending members were asked to vote on a proposal by the board to increase dues by $5.00 a year beginning in January 2008. It was passed by unanimous vote. This is the first increas in dues in about 15 years, and still puts the dues well below even "social" prospecting clubs. With the increase fuel, materials, reclamation, store items, postage, paper, printing, etc, the increase still is not keeping up with our added expenses. Those who attend the meetings and volunteer at the demos are helping to cover those costs more than members who are outside the Colorado area. There was a proposal to increase dues substantially to those who live out of state. That propasal will be discussed by the board and may come up for voting early next year. Input to these ideas are welcome and can be sent to info@hookedongold.com to be forwarded to the GPOC board for consideration.

There is still much talk about Cache Creek, and with the mild weather many are taking day outings up there for some fall fun finding gold. The Twin Lakes area is wonderful to visit any time of year you can get up there. The BLM will be touring the Point Bar and Prospector #3 areas on the Arkansas, and will be trying to run past Cache Creek for a look see. Hooked on Gold will be sending our recommendations to the BLM Canyon City office head, Dan Grenard, for possible impovements on the area. Time to get those metal detectors out and swing over some parks that have been used all summer by others while you were in the mountains.

Gold in Sylvanite and Telluride hunting

Snow in the High Country


Well, the weekend is over and we had a ball picking up old ore pieces from Cripple Creek! The sylvanite and telluride deposits there are VERY interesting. Seems that the largest visible gold deposits are in a quartz layer, but the sylvanite appears to run in a rhyolite type of rock that is super hard. We'll have to research more about the types of rock these deposits were in. Never thought to do that before. HMMMM. The more we know the more we know we don't know.

After that we spent a pleasant hour for lunch at our favorite Chinese restaurant in Colorado Springs, and then off to metal detect a soccer field. THAT was interesting in the 50+ mile an hour wind that kicked up in the afternoon. Larry picked up $.22 while I resized pictures on the computer. The amount of sand that blew in the face was too much to deal with. However, the wind did blow the low out of here sooner than expected and we missed most of the rain and snow predicted. The high country got a few inches to a foot, and we got a light shower Sunday afternoon. Freezing temps were reported around the state this morning as the cloud cover went away and all of our heat vented into space. This next week is supposed to be glorious, so anyone looking to take a trip to Cache should have decent weather in the low to mid 50's to work in. The gold coming out of there has been consistent all summer in the best layers. How are you doing cleaning up those concentrates?

Gold 'n' Fall

Fall colors on the power line road at Cache Creek, Colorado


Rockies Win and advance to the playoffs with a 13 inning win against the Padres Monday night! Exciting for Coloradoans! They have been stalked this morning from the air in Philadelphia taking their bus from the airport to their hotel.

Snow today is flying at Georgetown, with wet and slushy roads in the northern mountains. Fall is in full swing, and it is getting hard to find golden aspens as they drop their leaves and colder temps move south. The Arkansas River is now closed to motorized equipment until April 1st, but still open to dry washing, panning, and sluicing.

Did I mention the azure blue skies we are enjoying now that the air has dried out? Our last few days in the mountains late in September was magnificent with color. The pictures that were taken do not do it justice, as the camera adjusts too much for the brightness of the light coming from a sun lower in the sky, but still shows skies bluer than blue. The gold taken out of Cache Creek this year was substantial, and everyone had a terrific time finding it. We heard of only one problem all year, and that involved lack of water. Other than that, everyone got along pretty well, and everyone found gold, even witha pan. I, myself, took out several grams just using a pan while testing various layers and levels. The gold is nice and chunky with depth. Larger flakes were found and some round nuggets as well. Nothing really big, but larger than is found on the Arkansas. Two rock sources were identified, too. One is coming out of a black hematite type rock and the other quartz. We have several small pieces that are wrapped around quartz, and several wrapped around a black rock that is non magnetic. Metal detectorists have taken a few pieces out in either black rock or iron stained bull quartz as well.

Have you been watching gold this week? It is down to $732.20 right now after topping above $745.00 yesterday. Gold producers are now saying that if gold does not break out soon, they will be having a harder time producing it as their expenses rise faster than the price of gold. The dollar is up this morning causing the fall in the price of gold today.