Sunday Gold Musings

Good morning! Two things came up today I wanted to let you know about. First, is an interesting tid bit from the newspaper. It seems the police and a St. George, Utah bank are looking for a woman who brought 14 gold St. Gaudins coins into the bank to exchange for cash. They are estimated to be worth about $18,000 to $20,000 depending on year and condition. The woman received $280 for them as banks only deal in face value money. Needless to say, they are worth many times the cost of the groceries she had waiting for her in Wal-Mart, where they refused the coins in payment for the items.

The other is that Mt. Redoubt in Alaska erupted 2 more times on Saturday, sending ash 50,000 feet into the atmosphere again. I am wondering if volcanic eruptions are ever figured into the climate change figures that are supposed to be only for "man made" greenhouse gasses?

Off to visit with family today. We still have 7 inches of snow, so no metal detecting this weekend. :-(

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley

HookedonGold Gazette 3/27/09

That's Colorado Winter Gold! 15 inches of it, too

· Gold Spot Closing Price for Friday: $923.10
· Spot price last Gazette: $952.60
________________

Calendar of Events

MARCH
8th Daylight Savings Time begins in Colorado, Spring Forward!
11th GPOC Regular Meeting 7:00p.m.
17th St. Patrick’s Day
20th Spring Equinox

APRIL
· 1st April Fools Day, Motorized Equipment Opening Day on Arkansas River
· 10th Good Friday
· 12th Easter
MAY
· 5th Cinco de Mayo
· 8, 9, & 10th Let’s Go Gold Panning Days at Point Bar Recreational Area
· 23rd -25th Memorial Day Weekend Observed
· 30th Memorial Day
_______________________________________
NEWS

NEW! Prospecting Community Network! Check it out.

Snow yesterday and today has kept me busy with the snow shovel and taking pictures. ;-) We did get out and do some metal detecting last Sunday and came home with about $2.00 worth of coins that I posted and blogged about on the new community site while I was on there doing administrative updates. You can visit to see what we were up to and to see the picture. I do hope you are following me on twitter. My screen name is Goldpanner2.

APRIL 1st! Yes, it’s April Fools day, but it is also the opening day for this seasons' motorized prospecting equipment use on the Arkansas River. That means on Wednesday you can take you highbanker or dredge out and play in the water. You WILL have to have your 2 year permit in place for that, and you can find the forms on the http://www.blm.gov/ site on their page about the Arkansas River bond, and scroll down past the picture of Woody to where you find the sentence in green about the form. Click on that and you will open a PDF file that you can save or print off to fill in and send off.

I have decided to take the panning tips form down and replace it with 5 pages including the 4 panning tips. Since the bucket classifier is something that needs some knowledge of what you are doing, I have put an e-mail link into the DIY Bucket Classifier to request the information, but it may pop under the page and you will need to drop the page down to fill it out and send it. Subject line is already filled in and all I need is a first name and the message will send me your e-mail address to send the info to. It has stopped the spammers dead in their tracks since I took it down yesterday. LOL!

So much gets reported on twitter, I’m not sure where I am this week. Alaska’s Mt. Redoubt has been erupting since Sunday, and yesterday sent ash 12 miles into the atmosphere. I’d like to see how that stacks up against the power plants that are supposed to be causing the “climate change” in the arctic. Oh, wait! I DO! Over one years’ of man’s pollutants cannot compare with one volcanic eruption of pollutants thrown into the UPPER atmosphere. I also saw a reminder about the volcano in South America that blew its’ top in the late 80’s. I remember how shortly after that one, scientists were worried about the ozone hole that then magically closed up in, what, ’92? But, man was supposedly be to blame for that one too.

We deal with wilderness, protected status, and roadless issues, but did you hear about the energy company that put up wind turbines to make power with, only to find out they could not cross an area of land in protected status to deliver the power to the grid? True story. DID see this one coming, though. Wind turbines and solar power panels have to be out in the middle of nowhere, but getting the power to the grid is a huge problem with rights of way over land.

OOPPS! Am I “off topic”? I warned you about winter and having to deal with not being out prospecting for gold. LOL! Eric, I AM jealous of your gold prospecting trek to Utah this last week during Spring Break. Hope you post pictures for all of us on the ning community site this next week. I did not have time to check my alerts for news with past week as the new ning site has had me pretty busy with set up. I’ll give you a blog or two this next week with what I find. In the mean time…..

Panning Kits Here
Monthly Prospecting Equipment Specials HERE
Basic Prospecting Equipment

Until next week…….

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley (MQS)
Google has begun running third party ads and is requiring adsense sites to include information about this change on their websites. You can read about this on our Privacy Policy page.

World Open Panning website has this year’s world wide panning competitions listed and they add more all the time. A great site to visit: http://www.worldopenpanning.homestead.com/ . If the links do not work, copy and paste them into your browser.

If you find a broken link, please let us know
THE ARKANSAS RIVER is now closed TO MOTORIZED EQUIPMENT until April 1st. That’s this Wed, folks
_______________________________________
http://www.hookedongold.com/
http://www.hookedongoldprospecting.ning.com/
http://www.hookedongold2.com/ Metal Detectors at Auction
hookedongold@gmail.com contact us
PLEASE BE ADVISED: Ads that you might find on this blog or on a website using ads, may use cookies or other tracking means to track your movements on the web. Please read our Privacy Policy to see how this affects you and what you might want to do to prevent cookies being used to track you.

New Prospecting Social Network Announcment

http://www.hookedongoldprospecting.ning.com is being launched this week. Come on over and see what we are doing. Non members are welcome to view pages, but you will have to be a member to post. Membership is free, and we plan to have a lively community to get informaton to yu.

HookedonGold Gazette 3/20.09

Deafult icon on the new community site

· Gold Spot Closing Price for Friday: $952.60
· Spot price last Gazette: $929.40
________________

Calendar of Events

MARCH
8th Daylight Savings Time begins in Colorado, Spring Forward!
11th GPOC Regular Meeting 7:00p.m.
17th St. Patrick’s Day
20th Spring Equinox

APRIL
· 1st April Fools Day, Motorized Equipment Opening Day on Arkansas River
· 10th Good Friday
· 12th Easter
MAY
· 5th Cinco de Mayo
· 8, 9, & 10th Let’s Go Gold Panning Days at Point Bar Recreational Area
· 23rd -25th Memorial Day Weekend Observed
· 30th Memorial Day
_______________________________________
NEWS

Under the gun today! The new social site for prospectors can be found at http://www.hookedongoldprospecting.ning.com You can see the pages, but you will have to become a member of this social site to ask questions or participate in discussions. Sign up is easy with first name, email and maybe a question or two. You will have to be approved for sign up so that we can weed out spammers like WoW gold. You will then be able to use the same name and email address to access the over 800,000 other social sites on ning. AWESOME resource, and I will probably link other prospecting ning sites to me as I go along. Hope you like the experience, and that we can get some useful information out to you. Good questions I get by email will be shared with the community, too. Give me your thoughts about this project and what you would like to see. I would REALLY like to know what you think of the template. Does it fit OK or should I use one with less? Can you read the type alright? How do you like the font of the letters? This totally changeable, and if there is any problem with what I have chosen, I can change it. The purpose is for it to be to YOUR liking since YOU read it. I can publish with anything. If you visit another social site and would like to see one of their apps, let me know and I’ll take a look at it. I like a clean site with lots of info, but there are many apps that might be appropriate.

So, I had no other blog postings again this week. I’ve been working on getting the ning site up and that has pretty much tied up all my extra time. I DO hope this new venture will be good for you, however, and it has been interesting setting it up.

All are awaiting the opening of the Arkansas River to motorized prospecting in 12 days. The weather has been wonderful on Point Bar, but everything up above Buena Vista still has some snow. B.V. might be OK some days after the 1st of April, but it can still be pretty chilly.

Here are some links I am repeating that I twittered about this past week include: “The Case for Inflation” by Howard Ruff on the dollar, stock market, gold and silver. If you didn’t read it yesterday, you might like to now. Very interesting what he has to say.
Another one was on India and how they are affecting gold prices by using scrap gold to fill their gold jewelry demand without importing gold. Gold coins are heating up and the U.S. mint has suspended the minting of gold and silver coins again due to the price of the metals. I’m thinkin’ that means those Buffalos and St. Gaudins are going to be worth a lot more….make SURE you get them slabbed by PCGS or Numismatics. Cost is around $40.00 per coin, but it can boost their value by a couple hundred or more. There are several lesser grading houses around that charge you less, but the standards are PCGS and Numismatic. They have been around a long time and grade better than the others, in my opinion. I’ve been burned by some of the others, ad coin dealers use PCGS and Numismatic grades on all coins. So if your coin says MS70 from another house, if it isn’t so with these two giants, your coin will NOT be worth MS70 prices. You get what you pay for in coin grading.


I am off to finish the set up at Ning. See you in the forum.


PLEASE BE ADVISED THE FORMS PAGE IS STILL NOT WORKING!!!!! It is posted on the page prominently in two places that it is not working, but every day I have someone try to send it to me and all I get is the email with no information attached to it. Please send me an email to either info@hookedongold.com or hookeongold@gmail.com and ask for the specific information you are wanting. I can send it to you that way, but not with the form. If I get this social site working, I’ll take the form page down as I can post the information on the social site.


Panning Kits Here
Monthly Specials HERE
Basic Prospecting Equipment

Until next week…….

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley (MQS)
Google has begun running third party ads and is requiring adsense sites to include information about this change on their websites. You can read about this on our Privacy Policy page.

World Open Panning website has this year’s world wide panning competitions listed and they add more all the time. A great site to visit: www.worldopenpanning.homestead.com . If the links do not work, copy and paste them into your browser.

If you find a broken link, please let us know
THE ARKANSAS RIVER is now closed TO MOTORIZED EQUIPMENT until April 1st.
_______________________________________
www.hookedongold.com
www.hookedongold2.com Metal Detectors at Auction
hookedongold@gmail.com contact us
PLEASE BE ADVISED: Ads that you might find on this blog or on a website using ads, may use cookies or other tracking means to track your movements on the web. Please read our Privacy Policy to see how this affects you and what you might want to do to prevent cookies being used to track you.

HookedonGold Gazette 3/13/09

I just like this one...It's IMPRESSIVE!
Didn't think I would get this out in time, but once I started, it flowed.....kinda like water over a fall! LOL!

· Gold Spot Closing Price for Friday: $929.40
· Spot price last Gazette: $938.40
________________

Calendar of Events

MARCH
8th Daylight Savings Time begins in Colorado, Spring Forward!
11th GPOC Regular Meeting 7:00p.m.
17th St. Patrick’s Day
20th Spring Equinox

APRIL
· 1st April Fools Day, Motorized Equipment Opening Day on Arkansas River
· 10th Good Friday
· 12th Easter
_______________________________________
NEWS

WOW! Today it has been a challenge to get off of twitter and facebook and get to the newsletter! Facebook has some new features and a new look, so I spent some time on it to get used to the new feel. And then there is twitter, with all the news flying around with the people I follow. If you aren’t on twitter, you are missing a great resource for information….but be warned; it can be addictive to read everything! LOL!

One of the new communication items I keep finding on the web can be found at ning.com. It is a website that allows you to set up a forum type social network for your niche. GPOC president, Eric Vesterby, suggested a website for me to look at, and I noticed it was set up with ning. I have seen several others in other niches set up with the same website, and so Eric and I thought it might be a good idea to set one up for Hooked on Gold. I’ll be working on that this next week. It has a very interesting array of options that I think you will like. Social networks are very hot for users right now, and I could get you information quicker AND answer questions quicker. You could also ask questions of others and get answers. There is also a chat room and various discussion boards, so I think this is going to be a good fit for us.

PLEASE BE ADVISED THE FORMS PAGE IS STILL NOT WORKING!!!!! It is posted on the page prominently in two places that it is not working, but every day I have someone try to send it to me and all I get is the email with no information attached to it. Please send me an email to either info@hookedongold.com or hookeongold@gmail.com and ask for the specific information you are wanting. I can send it to you that way, but not with the form. If I get this social site working, I’ll take the form page down as I can post the information on the social site.

FYI, I did buy a new emerald ring last weekend, but not to wear now. My friend Pedro Arevalo who owns and operates T.L.E. International was taking old inventory back to Colombia to rework, and one of the rings has a very sweet marquise cut emerald of fantastic quality with VS1 baguettes in it. I have really like the stones in the ring, but I have one that is styled similarly with a mandarine garnet. I asked how much he wanted for the stones and he gave me a very good price, so I bought the stones to rework into a wedding set later on.

Are you ready for motorized equipment prospecting season to begin on the Arkansas April 1st? Everyone I talk with is itching to begin. Point Bar has been busy already with all the warm weather we had a couple of weeks ago, and getting into the water early is on everyone’s mind. We can’t until after Easter, as that was what I gave up for Lent. Believe me, giving up early prospecting is a big sacrifice for me! We are making headway with retirement the end of April, too, and setting up things for the summer. So far, we will be forced to take a week off before then or lose the time and money for it, and we will need to readjust a loan we made that the rules changed on. No BIG shoes have dropped so far, although we continue to watch for one that will stop us for another year. So far, we do not foresee anything large enough for us to pull back, yet. It’s gonna be a GREAT summer!

I also heard from Eric that the claims that were placed below GPOC’s Prospector #3 last summer, North of Buena Vista, have been denied and the area is once again open to the public. The BLM was there last Fall to see the claimants break camp and leave. This is GREAT news for everyone!

I had one link this past week that might be interesting for you to check out. It’s entitled “Gold going down in favor of equities, and silver up?” http://www.safehaven.com/article-12794.htm I still see some who predict the gold ETF’s could figure prominently in the course of where gold heads. Inflation will also be a determining factor in the next few years, but the ETF’s hold a tremendous amount of vaulted gold and when those folks decide to start selling, it could put gold in a tailspin. Silver is in a similar position, but they don’t own the same percentage of known bullion that the gold ETF’s do. Probably won’t happen until we hyper inflate, though, so watch for them to start pulling out of their gold positions when they need dollars to pay the rent with. In the meantime, gold coins are beginning to rise nicely and are commanding about 20% to 30% or more over spot for AU 55 and better.

HR699 is still on a desk somewhere. GPOC has a information on what you can do to get a letter to your congressperson before it gets passed. Do not bother signing and sending on any type of petition that gets passed by e-mail. It is a waist of your time, as it just gets passed around. There is no way for anyone to retrieve all those signature and send it anywhere, much less expect that anyone would even look at or consider such a petition that was received by a representative, as all of the names could be trumped up. Come on people…..use your heads. Where does it say in these emails how it will EVER get delivered, to whom, and WHEN? If you want to say anything to your representatives, you have to do it YOURSELF! You can find more information on this at http://www.gpoc.com .

Lots more going on, but I’ll have to blog it later this week. Happy Birthday today to my youngest grandson who is turning 2 years old!!! Have a happy Friday the 13th, everyone. I’m outta here.

Panning Kits Here
Monthly prospecting equipment Specials HERE
Basic Prospecting Equipment

Until next week…….

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley (MQS)
Google has begun running third party ads and is requiring adsense sites to include information about this change on their websites. You can read about this on our Privacy Policy page.

World Open Panning website has this year’s world wide panning competitions listed and they add more all the time. A great site to visit: www.worldopenpanning.homestead.com . If the links do not work, copy and paste them into your browser.

If you find a broken link, please let us know
THE ARKANSAS RIVER is now closed TO MOTORIZED EQUIPMENT until April 1st.
_______________________________________
www.hookedongold.com
www.hookedongold2.com Metal Detectors at Auction
hookedongold@gmail.com contact us
PLEASE BE ADVISED: Ads that you might find on this blog or on a website using ads, may use cookies or other tracking means to track your movements on the web. Please read our Privacy Policy to see how this affects you and what you might want to do to prevent cookies being used to track you.

HookedonGold Gazzette 3/07/09

OOOOH Emeralds in 18K Gold

· Gold Spot Closing Price for Friday: $938.40
· Spot price last Gazette: $939.60
________________

Calendar of Events
MARCH
8th Daylight Savings Time begins in Colorado, Spring Forward!
11th GPOC Regular Meeting 7:00p.m.
17th St. Patrick’s Day
20th Spring Equinox

APRIL
· 1st April Fools Day, Motorized Equipment Opening Day on Arkansas River
· 10th Good Friday
· 12th Easter
_______________________________________
NEWS

Short Newsletter today as I am in the booth selling Emeralds for the weekend. I have a couple of links for you. The first one is about the proposed changes to the mining law that will affect you. http://www.icmj.com/article.php?id=56&keywords=Rahall_Proposes_Bill_to_End_All_Mining_in_the_U.S. HR 699 Mining law proposal
As proposed now, anything over panning or hand sluicing would no longer be considered “casual”, and will be subjected to additional regulations, bonding, and plans of operation whether on your own claim, someone else’s, or open areas. Remember, this is not passed yet, but proposed and still in committee. If you have an opinion about it, you should contact your representatives in the congress and let them know what you would like tem to do.

Here is a link to a page that gives a good explanation of the difference between owning physical gold and one of the ETF’s or gold owned on paper. http://www.sprott.com/pdf/marketsataglance/MAAG.pdf

PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO GET INFORMATION OFF OF THE PANNING TIPS AND BUCKET CLASSIFIER PAGE. The page is still not working and I will have to find the path I have not included in it before it will. I did not build the last one, so I have to do some trial and error to get it to work. Requests are coming in daily, but the e-mail address you send me and the information you want is not coming in with the email. I have a broken link somewhere I have to find. Thanks for your patience.

Well, that’s it for me. I have a reader who sent me some information on Jefferson County open space rules on prospecting, so I will be getting that up on the proper page this next week. Much easier to do than the form. LOL! Have a great weekend and a great week!

Panning Kits Here
Monthly Specials HERE
Basic Prospecting Equipment

Until next week…….

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley (MQS)
Google has begun running third party ads and is requiring adsense sites to include information about this change on their websites. You can read about this on our Privacy Policy page.

World Open Panning website has this year’s world wide panning competitions listed and they add more all the time. A great site to visit: http://www.worldopenpanning.homestead.com/ . If the links do not work, copy and paste them into your browser.

If you find a broken link, please let us know
THE ARKANSAS RIVER is now closed TO MOTORIZED EQUIPMENT until April 1st.
_______________________________________
http://www.hookedongold.com/
http://www.hookedongold2.com/ Metal Detectors at Auction
hookedongold@gmail.com contact us
PLEASE BE ADVISED: Ads that you might find on this blog or on a website using ads, may use cookies or other tracking means to track your movements on the web. Please read our Privacy Policy to see how this affects you and what you might want to do to prevent cookies being used to track you.

info@hookedongold.com Down Way Too Long..PLEASE Try Again!

I know I have had way too much going on in my life when my e-mail goes down, and I don't even realise it.....for months. I got to thinking this past week that it seemed like a long time since I had gotten any e-mail. Now, mail IS slow during the winter, but...not THIS slow.

I decided early this morning to check out my cPanel and see what was going on, since I woke up very early and could not sleep. (High pressure systems do that to me. Make me bright eyed and bushy tailed! :=) All I could find was the possibility that the mailbox was overloaded, but there were not THAT many e-mails in the delivered box. I emptied it and reconfigured the mail and it is working again.

I cannot tell you how sorry I am if you have asked for information and not gotten it! Try again. In the mean time, I will be setting up a different account in gmail to handle this, as this is the second time in less than a year I have had trouble with email with the server. I use gmail for other things, and it works ALL THE TIME! For the next week or so, I will continue with the present account, but I will be changing the email address real soon. The first place you will find it is on the information submission page. After that, each website page that has it on it will have to be changed and republished, along with the email and tags at the bottom of all pages on the blog. Bear with me, and please ask for information again. I'm not ignoring you...I'm not getting the requests. Answering your questions and sending you information is one of the things I enjoy the most, so please send in those "cards and letters".

This winter has been awfully stressful. We have had a close family member pass away under stressful conditions, a son who went to the Philippines and was sent back home and fired over a blog posting, the joy and loss of a grandchild as our daughter-in-law miscarried her second child. Along with all of that we had the holidays to get through, too. It was a strange end to '08 for us and '09 has not been very much better so far. Happily, prospecting season is almost here and things for the family in general are looking up!

Good Prospecting to You
Shirley

HookedonGold Gazette 2/27/09

Won't Be Picking up Anything Like That with the New Federal Regulations on What you Can Pick Up on Federal Lands....

· Gold Spot Closing Price for Friday: $939.60…that’s below the close two weeks ago.
· Spot price last Gazette: $993.20
________________

Calendar of Events
FEBRUARY
· 2nd Groundhog Day
· 5th – 13th TUCSON Show (boy do we wish we could be there!)
· 11th GPOC Regular Meeting 7:00 p.m.
· 12th Lincoln’s B.D.
· 14th VALENTINES DAY Remember your honey today!
· 16th PRESIDENTS Day
· 22nd Washington’s B.D.
· 25th Ash Wednesday
· 27th – March 1st Jeffco Jewelry, Gem and Mineral Show at the Jeffco Fairgrounds

MARCH
8th Daylight Savings Time begins
11th GPOC Regular Meeting 7:00p.m.
17th St. Patrick’s Day
20th Spring Equinox
_______________________________________
NEWS

Well, the Feds have finally passed a law forbidding anyone from picking up rocks on Federal Land. (Probably includes yellow ones, too.) Don’t know, but that probably puts a crimp on any type of exploration on Federal Land. http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=89733 gives the story.

Gold was diving in heavy intraday trading to finish this week at $939.60. It had held in the $945 range for most of the day before dropping in the last minutes of trading.

The Jeffco Jewelry, Gem and Mineral show started today and will run through Sunday at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds. This show isn’t very big, but the vendors that attend are awesome, with a great selection of items including grab bags, and demos by the gemological society here in the Denver area. Best of all, it’s FREE and open to the public. We attend every year, and have a lot of fun along with finding some nice items that we can’t live without. LOL! The Jewelry and Gem show will be next weekend at the Merchandise Mart in the back, and I will get to visit the Emeralds again for three days in T.L.E International’s booth.

Are you getting anxious to get out and do some gold prospecting? We are, but we are also stuck in “work” mode until the end of April when Larry will retire unless the bottom falls out of our lives before then. Ya NEVER know what may be lurking around the corner. February has been mild by comparison to past years, and it makes Spring fever come a bit quickly.

In case you missed it last week, I had a twitter link to a story on how many people in India are selling their gold right now instead of buying it. The price is so high that many are selling their heirlooms to get cash. Now, it isn’t the only reason the price of gold has fallen in the past few days, but it does contribute as India buys more gold jewelry than any other country for its’ marriage season. This means that there will be more gold jewelry available in the market place that does not have to be bought outside that market, thus reducing the amount of gold jewelry they will need to buy on the open market. However, this also means that there will be more gold available to other markets if the gold bull market heats up later this year. So far, a stronger dollar is helping to keep the price of gold down, but that can only last for just so long before demand for the yellow metal exceeds supply.

Another report on gold output states that China and the U.S. have outperformed South Africa in gold output. South Africa says this is due to the ongoing problems it has been having with electrical supplies among others. In other news, gold coins world wide are becoming very hard to find. As demand is rising, coin makers will not keep up and the value will rise, some many times the spot price of gold. If gold is closing this week above its 20 day moving average, it's a good sign it will continue to rise for the near future. This all means that the placer gold you found last summer is worth more today than it was then. This year’s take will be worth more as well.

The continuing saga of roadless areas being closed produced this report I saw this week on Colorado’s roadless plan. This effects prospectors directly as the closing of dirt roads continues and limits access to the public of public lands. These areas are not “roadless”, they have many dirt roads that are not marked in them and are still considered “roadless”. You can read more about this in this article HERE. What I’d like clarified is exactly what “roadless” means. My opinion is that it is a way to get around the wilderness laws and to create “wilderness” without an act of Congress. Protected status is also used this way. This means that the public is severely limited in its’ access to public lands. We seem to be continually squeezed into smaller and smaller spots that we can access, and then everyone complains that there is so much use that those places are closed off, too. With roadless areas becoming more prevalent and the Feds now saying you can’t even pick up rocks on Federal Land, what is a body supposed to do? Stay in their house and play Wii? Gotta be a better solution. Oh, yeah. Join a gym and watch the out of doors go by on the screen of your treadmill. HA!

I followed a link off of twitter today that took me to a site with USGS maps of all the earthquakes recorded for this past week. Kinda interesting, and when I woke up to how long I had been studying it, I clicked out of it before saving the link so you could see it. Since I’m late with this newsletter, I’ll go look for it a little later and blog it to you in a day or so. (In case you didn’t see the twitter, some tree trimmers blew up a transformer in my neighborhood and the electricity was off for 2 hours of prime writing time.)

Last, I can’t go away without lamenting the closure of the Rocky Mountain News. I’ve loved and read the Rocky for over 50 years. It’s passing after almost 150 years in publication is a sad day for everyone. The Denver Post has generously decided to take over all the subscribers to the Rocky, but the slant to the whole paper is way too liberal for me. We won’t be taking a print paper in our household for the first time EVER. I spent part of the day adding news agencies to my twitter followings to get updates on what is going on in the world. Sad day for print, but an even sadder day for balanced reporting.

You will be happy to note as the days turn into spring, that my winter ranging into other territory besides gold prospecting will soon be over. I do try to bring it back to prospecting for gold, and hopefully, am successful in that attempt. So much is going on right now that does affect you and prospecting, that it is hard not to tell you about what I find out that can determine the success of your ambitions for finding gold. Some of it pertains to Colorado, some to all of the U.S. Soon, we will be out finding gold and reporting on what we are doing. My access to internet will be much better this next summer, and I am looking forward to that. Follow me on twitter or my tweets on the left hand side of this page. I retweet anything that I read that pertains to you and Twitter makes it easy to keep you updated with small bites of information. Hope you are enjoying them!

Ok, I’m outta here. All of you have a great weekend and find some gold!

Panning Kits Here
Monthly Specials HERE
Basic Prospecting Equipment

DIY Bucket Classifier
http://www.hookedongold.com/gold_panning_tips.html

Until next week…….

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley (MQS)
Google has begun running third party ads and is requiring adsense sites to include information about this change on their websites. You can read about this on our Privacy Policy page.

World Open Panning website has this year’s world wide panning competitions listed and they add more all the time. A great site to visit: www.worldopenpanning.homestead.com . If the links do not work, copy and paste them into your browser.

If you find a broken link, please let us know
THE ARKANSAS RIVER is now closed TO MOTORIZED EQUIPMENT until April 1st.
_______________________________________
www.hookedongold.com
www.hookedongold2.com Metal Detectors at Auction
info@hookedongold.com contact us
PLEASE BE ADVISED: Ads that you might find on this blog or on a website using ads, may use cookies or other tracking means to track your movements on the web. Please read our Privacy Policy to see how this affects you and what you might want to do to prevent cookies being used to track you.

Gold Prospecting and Lent

Summer Fun!

Happy Fat Tuesday to you! Ash Wednesday is tomorow and the beginning of Lent, so I have a question for you. What are you giving up for lent?

Now, since it is supposed to be something you like and it should be a sacrifice for you, I decided to think what I would be willing to give up of my gold prospecting until Easter. Easter is April 12th this year, so that means motorized dredging on the Arkansas would be allowed by then, and we do love to get out early! So, I have decided to give up dredging for gold for lent and forgo any serious fun in the water on the Arkansas early this year.

How about you? Leave a comment at the end of this post to let us all know, or you can contact me with your answer at info@hookedongold.com.

Spot price of gold is sliding right now and is under $972. Profit taking is probably the reason, but so is manipulation. I think those that can manipulate the price are doing so to a certain extent to try and stabilize stocks. If gold was to run away now, it could fuel a flight into the metal that could get more to exit stocks as the run began. Not to worry; it will rise later this year, but who knows how far? Link for you about the finanial situation and how banks did what they did. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=4

Have a GREAT one out there. It's Sunny in Denver and we are supposed to reach 70 degrees. Snow pack for Colorado so far is averaged at 112%, which means lots of water for this summer if we keep to these levels. March forecast is for snow in the mountains and drier for the Front Range.

HookedonGold Gazette 2/20/09

OOHH! Is THAT my part of the stimulus package?

· Gold Spot Closing Price for Friday: $993.20
· Spot price last Gazette: $941.60
________________

Calendar of Events
FEBRUARY
· 2nd Groundhog Day
· 5th – 13th TUCSON Show (boy do we wish we could be there!)
· 11th GPOC Regular Meeting 7:00 p.m.
· 12th Lincoln’s B.D.
· 14th VALENTINES DAY Remember your honey today!
· 16th PRESIDENTS Day
· 22nd Washington’s B.D.
· 25th Ash Wednesday
· 27th – March 1st Jeffco Jewelry, Gem and Mineral Show at the Jeffco Fairgrounds

MARCH
8th Daylight Savings Time begins
11th GPOC Regular Meeting 7:00p.m.
17th St. Patrick’s Day
20th Spring Equinox
_______________________________________
NEWS

The requests for information on this year’s gold prospecting season in Colorado have started to come in with people wanting to know if they can access places soon. Sorry, people, but U.S. Forest gates are not opened until Memorial Day. However, you are allowed to hike into these areas if you want to. Be advised, though, that the mountains have between 120% and 175% of average snowpack right now, and March and April are our snowiest months. April 1st will open the Arkansas River drainage to motorized equipment; just be advised that the Cache Creek road will not be open that early, and the amount of snow that could be in the areas above Salida.

Busy week on twitter. If you aren’t following me on twitter, you are missing information on a lot of different things! Gold is the important one for me, but I retweet some info on a variety of subjects. The facebook TOS information was viral on twitter, and I follow a couple of really good gold sites I found there.

I got cards today about the Annual Jeffco Jewelry, Gem and Mineral Show at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds February 27th through March 1st. We always find interesting things there, and some GOLD, too. Mentioning gold reminds me that the spot price has been mostly up this week. I hear it has been a very busy week on trading it, too. A lot of flight is going into gold right now; coins and jewelry at the top of the list. Gold bars aren’t really available to investors, so they buy up what is available, and, as I reported last week, there isn’t that much of it around, either. If this continues, gold prices will go up very quickly. Right now, we are watching the price to breach $1008, which will propel it to around the $1038 range. Silver took a huge jump this past week, and platinum continues to trade around $100 above gold.

I found an interesting article on gold and platinum concerning the conversion of hydrogen and oxygen into H2O2. You can read about it HERE. Interesting read on another reason why the modern world needs gold.

I came across a great blog on treasure hunting I think you will like. The Okietresurehunter has some interesting links and things to say about gold and some of the lost places it has been found and not rediscovered. http://okietreasurehunter.blogspot.com/2009/02/utah-red-gold.html I really enjoyed this blog.

The bailout program has been all over the web this past week, but I particularly didn’t like what GM is planning to do with their share of the money. I thought this was about saving and creating jobs, but apparently GM thinks they should take the money and run to Brazil where they are building a plant. All thos UAW jobs are literally “going south”. No wonder the UAW is strumping in the west so hard to convert our workers to unions. Anyway, you can read it for yourself, and BTW, this plant has been under construction for a while. http://www.laht.com/article.asp?CategoryId=12396&ArticleId=320909 Your bailout money at work. ;-)

That’s it for today; short and sweet. Hope the winter is treating you well!
Panning Kits Here
Monthly Specials HERE
Basic Prospecting Equipment

DIY Bucket Classifier
http://www.hookedongold.com/gold_panning_tips.html

Until next week…….

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley (MQS)
Google has begun running third party ads and is requiring adsense sites to include information about this change on their websites. You can read about this on our Privacy Policy page.

World Open Panning website has this year’s world wide panning competitions listed and they add more all the time. A great site to visit: www.worldopenpanning.homestead.com . If the links do not work, copy and paste them into your browser.

If you find a broken link, please let us know
THE ARKANSAS RIVER is now closed TO MOTORIZED EQUIPMENT until April 1st.
_______________________________________
www.hookedongold.com
www.hookedongold2.com Metal Detectors at Auction
info@hookedongold.com contact us
PLEASE BE ADVISED: Ads that you might find on this blog or on a website using ads, may use cookies or other tracking means to track your movements on the web. Please read our Privacy Policy to see how this affects you and what you might want to do to prevent cookies being used to track you.

Future Gold Prices and Twittering

Blogging is changing. There are so many new plug ins you can use to update a blog, it isn't really necessary to actually log into a blog to post to it.

Today, I am logging in to leave a link to a page about what future gold prices might be doing that I twittered about earlier. Twitter has allowed me to bring you more timely news about gold as I find it. In 140 charachers, I can twitter away all day to you about what I am reading and my comments post directly to this blog and facebook. When you come to this page, make sure you look at the left hand column to see what I have been twittering about. Most of it is about gold, but you will find some other items I have to post, too. I LOVE twitter! It has given me an opportunity to bring news to you as I find it. I KNOW I'll be using it a lot more this summer, too.

Here's an interesting link to an article about the price of gold. If you aren't watching the spot price of gold today, it is sitting at $981.50 now. Twitter gives me an opportunity to tell you about that as it happens, too. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/eff64394-fdd7-11dd-932e-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1 Have a great day, everyone!

HookedonGold Gazette 2/13/09

Here's another gorgeous piece of gold from the Denver Gem and Mineral Show this past September

· Gold Spot Closing Price for Friday: $941.60
· Spot price last Gazette: $911.40
________________

Calendar of Events
FEBRUARY
· 2nd Groundhog Day
· 5th – 13th TUCSON Show (boy do we wish we could be there!)
· 11th GPOC Regular Meeting 7:00 p.m.
· 12th Lincoln’s B.D.
· 14th VALENTINES DAY Remember your honey today!
· 16th PRESIDENTS Day
· 22nd Washington’s B.D.
· 25th Ash Wednesday

MARCH
8th Daylight Savings Time begins
11th GPOC Regular Meeting 7:00p.m.
17th St. Patrick’s Day
20th Spring Equinox
_______________________________________
NEWS

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY to all of you. Make it a golden one.

The spot price of gold sure has had its’ ups and downs this week, but it is steadily trending up each week, and looks like it will continue to do so for the near future. A pull back would be expected as the stimulus package gets approval next week, but all the charts are looking up for at least a quarter. If the markets like what they see next week, I would expect gold to pull back, but if they don’t like what Congress does, I look for gold to continue its’ upward march for a while. This summer could be interesting all the way around.

For those of you who are coin collectors, the new Lincoln Silver Dollar is for sale on the US Mint site now. They have also begun to release this year’s special penny’s, too. You can find more info on the coins at U.S. Mint.gov. (Boy, I hope I got that embedded link right!) If that link doesn’t work just try www.usmint.gov and find the page. The silver dollars are priced at $37.95 each.

Ok, I told you I had a thought or two on mining and green energy, so you have fair warning about what I’m about to write. I was reading about the wind turbine plants that are being built here in Colorado, and though I am pro business and love to see high paying jobs come to my state, it made me think about the process of green energy.

The end result of the turbines is supposedly green, but what about the process of building them? They are not made out of plastic, and if they were that would be a whole ‘nother question, but base metals, and that means those metals have to be mined somewhere. Many times, gold mining includes the mining of base metals, and often it is what sustains a mine if a vein pinches out.

Now, if we close all those gold mines because some think gold is not essential, where do we go for the base metals to build the wind turbines and solar panels that take up so much land surface, and need batteries to store up their energy? If we need so many of these turbines and solar panels in this country, why are we making other countries mine what we need in more toxic conditions? (Of course, if we didn’t, those countries populations would not have as many jobs, either) If we “need” so much here, how green is it to mine our metals somewhere else and import them? I’ve said it before, and I will say it again; if you use metals that are not mined in this country where you can control the environmental conditions within reason, you have no right to go around saying that mining in other countries should be stopped because it is toxic to the environment.

Walk, don’t ride a bike, drive a car, or take a plane anywhere you are going. Petroleum based products are mined just as are metals. It takes some type of energy to “make” those turbines before they can produce energy themselves, and the return is not as great as what it took to produce the product. It is the law of diminishing returns. The same law says that you cannot make enough energy from the sun as what it takes to produce the item that is collecting it. The same is true with ethanol. You cannot get the same amount of fuel out of corn that must be grown and converted.

This is why fossil fuels are so efficient for us right now. Even though we cannot get the same amount of energy out of it that was put into it, it was created billions of years ago from energy spent even more billions of years ago. With green energy, we are trying to use what we have available right now to meet the needs we have RIGHT NOW. The law of diminishing returns says that isn’t possible under the current circumstances. There is no known perpetual motion machine. The answer? I have no idea, but I am certain we are throwing an awful lot of money at a solution that cannot work in the long run. My hope is that through this trial and error, we actually find a solution that can work.

Right now, I do not see us getting away from fossil fuels for quite some time, and green efforts will be expensive and not be able to return what anyone expects. The numbers simply do not add up. My basis for this opinion? My husband has worked in the energy industry for over 30 years. While I am not in that capacity, we do discuss the topic with many people in the field, and so I have a vested interest in finding another solution that is viable and cost effective to the customer.

Remember, YOU are the one who will pay for all of this. Should your government ever decide to nationalize the energy section, you will pay for it, too, and at a MUCH higher price. Fossil fuels and global warming has been pretty much debunked in scientific circles so the new catch phrase has been changed to “Climate Change”. If a singe volcanic eruption can put out more Co2 than all the industrial pollutants put out in every country in the world for one year, how can we blame fossil fuel consumption for climate change or global warming. Climate change has been plotted for centuries. Droughts come and droughts go. But, then I hear they blame colder winters on it, too.

So, now you’re asking what this has to do with prospecting for gold? All of these attitudes keep others who think their “green” concerns are more important than yours, and they have been and are right now effecting how, where and when you can look for gold. Some of these things are just silly and are made to keep you from pursuing prospecting gold or gemstones or anything else, for that matter, but road closures and “studies” keep you out of areas that have been historically open to the public. Public land isn’t so public any more, and more and more special interest groups are gaining “private” access to public lands. When the government closes a public lands area, they aren’t preserving it for you. They are keeping you out. Now, everyone knows I’m blonde, so I’m probably wrong about all of this. However…….

I read an interesting item today about the amount of gold that has been produced, but rarely do I see anything about the current annual production of gold. I saw it today and thought I’d pass it along to you FYI.
Total produced to date approximately 140,000 tons
Worth 4.5 trillion dollars at $1,000 per ounce
75% is in gold coins or jewelry
2,600 new tons produced every year, or we are adding about 2% per year
Worth 83 billion dollars
Doesn’t look like much gold is out there, to me. Our own spending in this country way outstrips how much we find. Now you know why we use paper. LOL!

I suppose that’s enough for today. I’ll have to blog later about the other news, as I’ve probably taken up more of your time than you wanted me to, now. LOL! I twitter daily, so follow me there. It also posts here in the left hand column and on facebook. Prospecting equipment links below and some DIY sites, too.

Panning Kits Here
Monthly Specials HERE
Basic Prospecting Equipment

Here are a few links to DIY projects:
Ratled's Highbanker
http://49ermike.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=181&topic_id=58181&mesg_id=58181&page=
Highbanker
http://www.49ermike.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=181&topic_id=65680&mesg_id=65680&page=
Slick Sluice Info.
http://golddredger.com/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi?az=read_count&om=106&forum=DCForumID9&viewmode=threaded
DIY Bucket Classifier
http://www.hookedongold.com/gold_panning_tips.html

Until next week…….

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley (MQS)
Google has begun running third party ads and is requiring adsense sites to include information about this change on their websites. You can read about this on our Privacy Policy page.

World Open Panning website has this year’s world wide panning competitions listed and they add more all the time. A great site to visit: www.worldopenpanning.homestead.com . If the links do not work, copy and paste them into your browser.

If you find a broken link, please let us know
THE ARKANSAS RIVER is now closed TO MOTORIZED EQUIPMENT until April 1st.
_______________________________________
www.hookedongold.com
www.hookedongold2.com Metal Detectors at Auction
info@hookedongold.com contact us
PLEASE BE ADVISED: Ads that you might find on this blog or on a website using ads, may use cookies or other tracking means to track your movements on the web. Please read our Privacy Policy to see how this affects you and what you might want to do to prevent cookies being used to track you.

Meetings, Metals, and Musings

The Gold Prospectors of Colorado meeting last night in Colorado Springs was well attended and our speaker, Larry Weilnau, spoke on metal detecting for gold in Colorado. Finding gold in Colorado with a metal detector can be tricky, since many of our deposits were in tellurides, silvanites, calaverite, wires, crystals, and small leaf, and there are metal detectors that do a better job of finding this type of gold than others.

A lively discussion followed the talk, with many people coming forward to see the specimens he brought and to see how the detectors would read them. If you are wondering where he detects for gold, he said it was somewhere west of Colorado Springs, east of Grand Junction, south of Blackhawk, and north of Durango. That about covers it. LOL!

You have to have your head in the sand if you aren't hearing anything about the new stimulus package. What would you do if you found out there was a chance that they would be coming back before the end of the year for another 3 trillion dollars? Hang on to your hat, because there is a possibility that might happen. Just remember, the more money Washington prints now, the higher inflation will be when the economy turns around. Funny thing is, the economy always turns around, even after the G.D. Slowly, but it did turn. AND even our President said this past week that this is no depression type scenario.

Anyone who reads my blog for any time, knows that I blog about prospecting for gold in the summer when we are out and about, and I blog about mining concerns in the winter when I have time to access more information. I have a couple of things to delve into tomorrow in the newsletter that came across my mind this morning that have to do with mining and green energy.

Gold slammed through the $950 ceiling this morning to $951 before turning back down, but it is on the rise again here at mid morning. If it continues in this fashion today we could be looking at the spot price reaching the $1,000 mark soon. With the stock market hating the stimulus package's lack of regulation, unemployment figures up, and more businesses closing, metals are due to rise this spring as predicted. One good bit of news today, though. The trade deficit is down again.

Have you been out prospecting yet this year? We have not, but with weekends warming up, we will be venturing out into the near mountains with friends, soon, to look for gold. At the very least, it gets us out of the house and into the sunshine. That's it for me. As always...

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley Weilnau

HookedonGold Gazette 02/06/09

This is just that big son of a gun from the Denver Gem and Mineral show last September, and I just like it.

· Gold Spot Closing Price for Friday: $911.40
· Spot price last Gazette: $927.10
________________

Calendar of Events
FEBRUARY
· 2nd Groundhog Day
· 5th – 13th TUCSON Show (boy do we wish we could be there!)
· 11th GPOC Regular Meeting 7:00 p.m.
· 12th Lincoln’s B.D.
· 14th VALENTINES DAY Remember your honey today!
· 16th PRESIDENTS Day
· 22nd Washington’s B.D.
· 25th Ash Wednesday

MARCH
8th Daylight Savings Time begins
11th GPOC Regular Meeting 7:00p.m.
17th St. Patrick’s Day
20th Spring Equinox
_______________________________________
NEWS

I’ve had a few minutes this past week to actually read some of the back issues of some of magazines we get. One that caught my eye was a report about the Washington State small scale mining regulations that have been fought about for years, now. I won’t go back into the background on this issue, as I have been reporting on it for a long time, but dredgers in Washington State have been hopeful that new regulations would be simplified and that any regulations imposed would be backed by sound science. Their hopes were in vain as a new 92 page regulation booklet will have more restrictions than before, including a ban on dredging in June and July because there “might” be fish eggs still in the gravels after spawning season ends. (Oh, and by the way, they are required to carry this regulation booklet on their person at all times while they are prospecting.)

This goes hand in hand with what I am reading and hearing about governmental opinions on the impacts of small miners and whether their activities have to be tolerated by officials. Your activities are quite likely to come under ever more restrictions, and keeping up with what is going on about regulations is going to be in your own best interest. Those of us who live in states that bear gold will need the cooperation of those who visit, or we could very well lose our rights to prospect for gold, metals or gemstones in the near future.

Another story I have written about here is the ongoing saga of the Odyssey Marine, a treasure seeking vessel that has, again, found another sunken ship with gold treasure, this time off the coast of England. As you remember, the last one they found was off the coast of Spain and they are still in court over who has rights to the gold found onboard.

Now, it seems, they have found HMS Victory, sunk in 1744 with all 1150 hands aboard and over 4 tons of Portuguese gold in its hold. Naturally, Britain claims the ship, Portugal the gold, and the Odyssey is saying “finders keepers”. Should be another fun time in court for them. I wonder how long it will be before any of this gets settled.

Yesterday, Goldman Sachs raised its’ forecast on the price of gold for the next three months. It is expecting the metal to reach $1,000 due to larger than expected demand, $300 higher than its’ previous prediction of $700. Just goes to show you, even the best are sometimes fooled about what is going on. LOL!

Well, my time is up and so I will leave you with an interesting story I found on my tweetdeck this morning. It concerns absolutely everything in your life because it is written about the stimulus package before congress right now. The author made some comments I thought you might like to read about. You can find it at http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2009/02/a-new-bailout-plan-hardly.html if you like, and if not I’ll just bid you Good Prospecting.

Panning Kits Here
Monthly Specials HERE
Basic Prospecting Equipment

Here are a few links to DIY projects:
Home Made Suction Nozzle
http://www.geocities.com/indianagold/home_made_dredge.htm

Battery Powered Mini Highbanker
http://www.geocities.com/indianagold/mini/battery_powered_mini.htm

DIY Equipment Sluice, Hand & Mini Hand Dredge, Classiffer
http://semprfish.com/

DIY Bucket Classifier
http://www.hookedongold.com/gold_panning_tips.html

Until next week…….

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley (MQS)
Google has begun running third party ads and is requiring adsense sites to include information about this change on their websites. You can read about this on our Privacy Policy page.

World Open Panning website has this year’s world wide panning competitions listed and they add more all the time. A great site to visit: www.worldopenpanning.homestead.com . If the links do not work, copy and paste them into your browser.

If you find a broken link, please let us know
THE ARKANSAS RIVER is now closed TO MOTORIZED EQUIPMENT until April 1st.
_______________________________________
www.hookedongold.com
www.hookedongold2.com Metal Detectors at Auction
info@hookedongold.com contact us
PLEASE BE ADVISED: Ads that you might find on this blog or on a website using ads, may use cookies or other tracking means to track your movements on the web. Please read our Privacy Policy to see how this affects you and what you might want to do to prevent cookies being used to track you.

Hooked on Gold page Updates

Dashing off a quick note today. The regular newsletter will be published tomorrow, but I wanted to let you know that the pages under "Articles of Interest" were all reworked, organized, and republished this week with one new page added to the group, called Why Learn To Use a Gold Pan?. More updates as the weeks go by, but I only seem to be able to tackle 4 or 5 pages at a time. LOL!

NEWS: Shipwreck may produce 4 tons of gold coins and bars. Read about it here.

Anyone along the Front Range of Colorado who isn't out in this gorgeous weather is missing a day to be remembered. Gold fever has us wishing we were in Arizona prospecting for gold, but on days like today, it's easier to let the day pass pleasantly and think of prospecting we did in the past and will do in the future. New adventures will await us this summer during our regular prospecting season, I am sure! In the mean time, how about a good book to read on prospecting until the Arkansas River opens up to motorized equipment April 1st.

Are you looking for prospecting equipment for this next season. You can find prospecting equipment clearance items at reasonable prices, or metal detectors for sale at the links.

See ya tomorrow,
Shirley

Gold and Poverty in Third World Nations

Well, I'm taking some time out of site updates and rewriting copy to get a blog posting off before I forget! Twitter has me doing things very fast and short, so maybe I'll just be to the point!

National Geographic published a piece about gold and gold prospecting in their January issue. In case you didn't see it, it's the one with the lady's face on the front that is covered in gold leaf. Needless to say, the author attempted to paint a dismal picture of gold and its' extraction, and to be sure, there isn't any among use who would encourage Africa's continued use of mercury by their small miners, but the story about Newmont was certainly not all told.

However, there was one point that was made concerning the mining of gold by the small miners in all third world countries. Without gold prospecting and recovery, many of these people would have no other way to support themselves, and even if a child bruises their hands while digging, they are willing to do it so that they can go to school and better themsleves. Without the world needing and wanting gold, these people would either starve or have to go to some overpoplulated urban area and abandon their ways of life outside the cities. Certainly a new gold strike will bring in too many people and make conditions worse for everyone, but one man's vice is another man's bread. If India did not cling to their way of life and demand the amount of gold jewelry that they do, many others would have no life at all. How would you support the thousands who support themselves now if gold was not important in the world. Would it be better that we have even more people doing without?

I read another good analogy last week by a journalist who had some time on their hands while reporting on the conditions in a third world country and what the sweat shops mean to them. By standards in the U.S., the conditions were apalling, however in this country and many like it, the chance to have one of these so called sweat shop jobs, even by the very young, is a way out of a type of poverty we in the U.S can only imagine. (And quite frankly, I think we cannot imagine it)Think of having to dig through piles of garbage to find enough food, only to be killed by a trash truck when you got too close to its' wheels. I think I would rather work 18 hours a day than do that, and most of them would, too. The gold miners of the third world certainly would rather eke out their own exsistance in the mines and placers of the world, and keep some semblance of freedom for themselves. Placing our standards on a country that has no fast food restaurants and expecting those countries to pay our minimum wages is ridiculous. Those jobs afford whole generations of a family to live much better than they would without it. I don't think there are many people in the U.S. that support three or more generations with one job. If we did not need and want more than we should, others would have no way to make a living at all.

HookedonGold Gazette 1/30/09

Cache Creek Mascot

· Gold Spot Closing Price for Friday: $927.10
· Spot price last Gazette: $898.30
________________

Calendar of Events
FEBRUARY
· 2nd Groundhog Day
· 5th – 13th TUCSON Show (boy do we wish we could be there!)
· 12th Lincoln’s B.D.
· 14th VALENTINES DAY Remember your honey today!
· 16th PRESIDENTS Day
· 22nd Washington’s B.D.
· 25th Ash Wednesday
_______________________________________
NEWS

The end of January with only a day to go. Seems like only yesterday it was Christmas, and here it is almost February. LOL! Maybe it’s because my work has piled up around me so much and I have been so busy that the time has flown. Good for me, though, because it will mean that prospecting season will be here sooner and I can be out in the woods. In the mean time I am updating Hooked on Gold, blogging, tweeting, blogging some more and working on a few things for bellahealthsystems. (Regular followers know that BHS is my sons’ business in RFID temperature and identification for cattle).

Monday is Ground Hog day, and we will know if old man winter will stay with us or we will get an early spring. My guess is that with “climate change” being what it is, it could go either way. No matter what, the Arkansas River will reopen for motorized equipment on April 1st…whether is it snowing or not.

There has been a lot of interesting things going on in the news this week. The first thing that comes to mind is the almost eminent eruption of Mount Redoubt in Alaska, near Anchorage. It seems the volcano has been waking up since last Fall , and as of the 23rd of January its’ seismic activity has escalated to the point that residents are being told to stock up on essentials as scientists expect the mountain to blow in the next couple of weeks. Now, this might not have anything to do with gold, but every person who is out prospecting for gold I know of is always interested in what goes on in Alaska!

In the world news today I found an article from Burma about the government having given the mining rights of a gold mining area to a Chinese Company to mine gold. It has forbidden the locals to continue their practice of finding gold in the streams of the area to supplement their families, and many rely solely on it for income. To make sure the locals do not mine the gravels, they are confiscating their mining equipment. The area is too cold to farm and many villagers may have to move from their traditional homes to survive. You have probably heard about the National Geographic piece that was written about gold mining in its’ January issue. I have finally obtained a copy and will give a review of the story this next week in a blog posting. Works right into this report I found from Burma.

The Reuters news wire reported from Japan that there is a local sewage treatment plant that has been pulling more gold per tonne out of the ash of incinerated sewage than the top producing gold mine in the area, the Hishikari Mine. It seems that the sewage carries so much gold due to the high number of high precision manufacturers using gold in the area that dump sewage into the treatment plant. The recently reported amount found was 1890 grammes of gold per tonne in the incinerated sewage ash. Not bad for a sewage plant, eh? Certainly one of the strangest places I've ever heard of to find gold.

There’s more, but I will leave it for another day and another blog posting. Don’t forget to visit the special pages for equipment linked for you below.
Panning Kits Here
Monthly Specials HERE
Basic Prospecting Equipment

Here are a few links to DIY projects:
The quietest dredge in the world
http://www.treasurenet.com/forum/prospecting/messages/1013278.shtml
River Rocker
http://www.goldprospectors.org/pdf/JackRocBox2.pdf
Prospecting Equipment plans
http://www.infowest.com/personal/w/wfletcher/prospecting.html

Until next week…….

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley (MQS)
Google has begun running third party ads and is requiring adsense sites to include information about this change on their websites. You can read about this on our Privacy Policy page.

World Open Panning website has this year’s world wide panning competitions listed and they add more all the time. A great site to visit: www.worldopenpanning.homestead.com . If the links do not work, copy and paste them into your browser.

If you find a broken link, please let us know
THE ARKANSAS RIVER is now closed TO MOTORIZED EQUIPMENT until April 1st.
_______________________________________
www.hookedongold.com
www.hookedongold2.com Metal Detectors at Auction
info@hookedongold.com contact us
PLEASE BE ADVISED: Ads that you might find on this blog or on a website using ads, may use cookies or other tracking means to track your movements on the web. Please read our Privacy Policy to see how this affects you and what you might want to do to prevent cookies being used to track you.

Gold Markets, Gold Miners and Gold Jewelry

The gold spot price is back up above $900 today, and a search for some information on the rise gave me some interesting analysis. Calls on the SPDR Gold ETF (GLD is the other one) are up 4 times normal over Friday, and share prices of the miners were up as well.

Analysts are predicting the price of gold to rise for the next few months, too. However, the Indian market wants a lower price, of course, as they go into their marriage season so that brides will have ample dowries going into a marriage. If she doesn't have enough gold going into the marriage, the grooms family can cancel the marriage, or there can be other consequences for the bride. This is why the Indian marriage season is so important to the price of gold and gold jewelry, and gifts to the bride are always in 21 to 24K gold jewelry, not in coins or bars, or raw gold.

On the world scene, Guyana is expecting as much as a 50% drop this year in gold prospecting, after an 18% increase in '08. I have been reading that many of the exploratory companies are also scaling back exploration this year.

As to us, I don't think we will be scaling back our own gold exploration, so you can bet you'll be seeing us around the gold bearing areas in Colorado this summer. Looking forward to a very pleasant and profitable gold season, ourselves.

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley Weilnau

Hooked on Gold Gazette 1/23/09

Nice picture of one of the old dredges!

· Gold Spot Closing Price for Friday: $898.30
· Spot price last Gazette: $853.60
________________

Calendar of Events
JANUARY
· 1st New Years Day
· 15th Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday
· 19th MLK Day observed
· 20th Inauguration Day
FEBRUARY
· 2nd Groundhog Day
· 5th – 13th TUCSON Show (boy do we wish we could be there!)
· 12th Lincoln’s B.D.
· 14th VALENTINES DAY Remember your honey today!
· 16th PRESIDENTS Day
· 22nd Washington’s B.D.
· 25th Ash Wednesday
_______________________________________
NEWS

My search for information this past week has taken me all over the place and back. It’s been hard to focus on just what I want to put into the newsletter this week, so if I get off track, just remember it’s been very nice here in Denver, and it has probably influenced my point of view. If you think that’s possible, then I have no worries. LOL!

Prospecting for gold has gotten a little more profitable this week, with gold up a bit to almost $900, hitting a high today of $903.00. There is more skuttle around that the gold cartel is manipulating the price again, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are. Can’t have gold running away with all that funny money being printed around the world. No body would buy the paper stuff. Good news is that India may be back in a buying mood, however analysts say that even they cannot buy if the price remains above $900. Jewelry makes up a large part of the gold market, and India certainly buys its’ share of it for their brides. Their system might be easier than ours when it comes to supporting wives left behind by death or divorce….at least as long as the gold price is up. Unfortunately, there is nothing to prevent a husband from ever adding to their wife’s retirement plan, either, so what she has when she gets married is often all she ever has. She isn’t allowed to own anything else but jewelry, either. That’s right….no coins, just 21K gold jewelry or better.

While I am updating the website (oh, and there should be some stuff being published soon) I have once again come across many websites that would be of interest to you. Since google frowns on so many outbound links from my main site, I am thinking I will use the “info” domain to publish these on as a kind of catalog of information for you that you can visit to find information not on my site. There is a ton more information out there then there was when I started Hooked on Gold over three years ago. Also, I am splitting up pages and grouping them together, as in page 1, 2, 3 etc., off of their main page. These pages also have their own names so you can, hopefully, find the area you are interested in more quickly. Navigation is a top priority this year, so look for more navigation and deeper linking, and Cache Creek will get its’ own page this year.

I looked up my link to the Leadville Herald and saw an interesting post about the EPA and the proposed cleanup of OU6, the area to the east of town, which includes Stray Horse Gultch, and the upper and lower portions of Evan’s Gultch. It seems the EPA, at the Jan. 15th meeting in Denver, has decided that the present proposed remedy is not sustainable. One proposal is to cap and consolidate mine waste from the Makado, RAM, Pyranees, and Greenback mines, but the solution is unpopular due to the amount of negative effect it would have on the historic mining district. Up to now they have spent 6 years trying to find a viable solution to the area and have decided they must deal with the source to prevent the continued pollution. You can see the entire article at http://www.leadvilleherald.com/.

As many of you know, Leadville was at the center of Colorado mining during the boom days, and the history of those old mines is fascinating. I read a book about some it this last fall that you might like. “Leadville: Colorado’s Magic City” by Edward Blair. It goes over a lot of the politics, strikes, early days, as well as the mining. A great winter read, and some wonderful old pictures. You can find it on Amazon or you could look it up in the search box on the Gold Library page on the website.

Did you know that google ads now have up and down arrows at the bottom of the ad box so you can scroll through all the ads they are presenting on a page? I didn’t until I saw someone do it recently.

I think I’m about done for today. I’ll be blogging this next week, so stay tuned to read what else I find online or in the news that has to do with gold.

Panning Kits Here
Monthly Specials HERE
Basic Prospecting Equipment

Here are a few links to DIY projects:
Puffer Drywasher plans
http://miningold.com/dry.html

Sluice Boxes
http://miningold.com/slu.html

Building a Banjo
http://groups.msn.com/AlluvialGoldProspectors/tipstricks.msnw?action=get_message&mview=0&ID_Message=7581&LastModified=4675585268593100901

Until next week…….

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley (MQS)
Google has begun running third party ads and is requiring adsense sites to include information about this change on their websites. You can read about this on our Privacy Policy page.

World Open Panning website has this year’s world wide panning competitions listed and they add more all the time. A great site to visit: http://www.worldopenpanning.homestead.com/ . If the links do not work, copy and paste them into your browser.

If you find a broken link, please let us know
THE ARKANSAS RIVER is now closed TO MOTORIZED EQUIPMENT until April 1st.
_______________________________________
http://www.hookedongold.com/
http://www.hookedongold2.com/ Metal Detectors at Auction
info@hookedongold.com contact us
PLEASE BE ADVISED: Ads that you might find on this blog or on a website using ads, may use cookies or other tracking means to track your movements on the web. Please read our Privacy Policy to see how this affects you and what you might want to do to prevent cookies being used to track you.

Our Wish for the New Administration and a Prospectors' New Year's Resolution

Wouldn't mind a stack like that, would you?

Gold is up to $856 today and stock market is off 332. No comment!

WOW! I did a good job of getting all my information out last week. I thought I had left one out, but it looks like I got everything said that was on my list. I have lots of other opinions , but they aren't necessarily appropriate for a gold prospecting blog, so I'll spare you my soap box. So many things are interconnected with mining and prospecting for gold, precious metals or gemstones, that it is hard to decide which topics are appropriate for these pages.



As we inaugurate a new President today, may I say that I wish the new administration well, and pray that they all find the wisdom they will need to lead us from here. And as the old administration leaves, may I also say that the choices they made may not have been any different had someone else been at the helm. Hind sight is ALWAYS 20/20, and sometimes the choices are bad and less bad.

We are having record and near record warmth here in Denver, and the nice weather is really welcome. Not to worry, though, we are back to colder temps by Friday and the weekend. January usually gives us a nice warm up just to tease us into thinking it is Spring right before it puts us into the deep freeze one moe time before it starts to warm up seriously. We are all out washing windows and getting things cleaned up in time for the next cold snap that will keep us in or near the house for the rest of the winter.

I have begun my updates to the website, but it will be slow going this year with the size of the site. I'll start posting updates next week, but you might not see much happening as I have eliminated the GPOC companion pages, changed the name of another page and broken that one up into two pages. I AM hoping to get the menu under better control with some roll overs for subpages, but it will be last on my list as it will take quite a bit of time to do it. Site maintinence must come first as well as new information pages.

Here's a good New Years' Resolution for you: I resolve to do more prospecting for gold, precious metals, and gemstones so I can keep my other New Years' Resolutions to get fit and lose weight. Words to live by, don't cha think?

I have a new twitter follower by the handle of keepinitinthepan. You might want to look him up on twitter and follow along.

Good Prospecting to You,
Shirley Weilnau
www.hookedongold.com
info@hookedongold.com