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!!!