Prospecting for Lead and Silver ores 

No, its a political hell, but I will keep plugging away.

Thank you for the kind words!

Thank you for the kind words!

Glad you enjoyed it. Next will be a couple videos on aluminum.

Thank you for the kind words! Glad you enjoyed it.

Thank you for the kind words! 😃

I'm glad you enjoy them.

Glad you enjoyed it.

Glad you enjoyed it!

You can do it!

Glad it was helpful!

Thanks, will do!

The schedule for the up coming couple of months is: A short series on the metal Aluminum; a series on all the minor but super important tech metals like: Lithium, rare earths, Nickel and cobalt, uranium, etc. Then after that we will be back to all gold related stuff for a good long while.

Thank you for the kind words!

Hope you find lots of the Good stuff

@@ChrisRalph with ALL that info (and I am watching all the videos) plus the technology, plus the energy, it is impossible for me not to find it! lol

Glad it was helpful!

Glad that you found it helpful.

May God bless you as well.

Glad you liked it! Hey - you should have brought a weed burner torch with you to prospect in the snow with Gary! That's why I dont prospect in frozen ground.

@@ChrisRalph i have one and didnt even think about it till we got there !!!

Glad to hear that

Very cool! Best of luck to you in your quest.

@Nathan Miller Hey! Another Hillbilly! I hope you score well on your mining! I'm hoping to make a good strike on a polymetallic deposit which I am hoping is under my land! BUNNY LUCK to you with your mine! /)/) ( 'ˬ') @(>_ )-b \) \)

Glad you enjoyed the video.

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed the video.

Thanks.

Hmmmm....

Be sure to have it tested by an assay laboratory.

Glad you like it!

A sad state of affairs - loads of gold in California too, but the state government will make sure its not mined.

Happy new year! Thanks for the kind words.

Awesome, thank you! I am sure you will enjoy the book.

Interesting!

Can you take a video of this and share it? I’m curious of this

Friend - we have an understanding problem - you tell me your gold is minus 200, then you tell me your gold is nuggets. You tell me your gold is in a river, but rivers come in many sizes and types. I do not even know what country you are in, or how much money you have to spend. You must consider all these factors and decide for yourself. Please watch this video, it will help you decide. See: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-EF4oFvSHbJo.html See also: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-SqwkpH9LZIM.html As you learn more you will grow in knowledge and be able to decide best for yourself.

Glad you enjoyed the video.

Interesting. thanks for sharing.

It depends on the material. Very porous aggregates of lead minerals may not be particularly heavy. The solid crystals and less porous forms are dense. Sometimes there is not a lot of lead anyway - a deposit may be marked by gossans of mostly iron and manganese oxides.

Yeah, I wonder how many times I've walked over a potential deposit, and never knew it. Hummm ? 🤔

So to have a valuable lead mine you need many thousands of kg of galena - not 10 kg. Or it needs to have a lot of silver in it. You can have a lab do an assay and test it for silver content.

Glad it was helpful!

I hope you find big nuggets or nothing, so you dont have to throw those little fiddly bits aside (just too much work doing that).

As your assay shows there are small amounts of gold and silver with the lead.

Silver chloride is definitely worth picking up.

@@ChrisRalph this is in the general vicinity of the 'wedding chamber' find, but this covers a vast area. There are small limestone 'pipes' running all over the place right under the surface with rich ore

that should be 'Bridal Chamber'

Take a look at local prospecting clubs who often have claims or permissions to enter public property.

@@ChrisRalph - our locals have been inactive over the last year and from what im told for the foreseeable future - i did join a AZ club for this year that's active outdoors simply to have locations to practice in but they're a good 8hrs each way ...so they'll be long weekend ventures - / - my wife is pretty critical of my trips because i almost killed myself twice this last year down in the canyons, lol - messed my hip up once, and able to hang on the second time, temporarily loosing my backpack (haven't broke any bones yet) - guess i just need to stop telling her about those parts of the adventure, lol

Many of the rare earths are worth dollars a pound - like copper or nickel. The ones that are super valuable are rare and occur only in small percentages in the Rare Earth ores.

Really hard to say. iron oxides or????

Since you started with "some rocks" - and I have no idea what those rocks might be - I have no idea whatsoever of what you have now.

There are rock and mineral color hand books you can buy on Amazon.

Mindat is a solid resource- I know almost nothing about NorCal, but it's a lot of serpentine, granite, and slate. There are some pegmatites and a lot of the slate is properly phyllite. Higher up are some mafic extrusive lavas and breccias and stuff that looks like basalt to me, apparently because they got uplifted from under the ocean or something, but they were down in there good like a couple thousand meters under the floor. I dunno, trying to learn myself. A big old intrusion done filled them rocks up with shiny. Serpentine to slate (I call it all slate, the schist and the phyllite) gradations are the good ones, but the granite has been weak for me. Similar circumstances produced the Juneau gold belt where gold deposited in stringers hosted in the black phyllite, and the granite there, the rusty diorite, also hosts gold. Search mindat plus your county and select macrostat in the bar of map options likely in the upper right. Clicking the colors brings up descriptions of the rock units etc. If you already know about mindat, sorry to waste your time. Although it isn't a book, it tends to have very concise regional specificity. It's pretty incredible, really. I struggle sometimes with the terminology, but it's important to remember with rocks that it's more like naming hues on the spectrum than species of life forms. CV Shorey's Earth Explorations is a good RU-vid geology explainer, not to undercut the venerable Mr. Ralph. Good luck.

You need to be more specific.

@@ChrisRalph It's called Bunker Hill Superfund Site now, and the area is contaminated with heavy metals.

I'm in Nevada so its not easy for me to access and explore the area. Here is some info (there is much more info on the internet). The Coeur d’Alene Basin Cleanup is also known as the Bunker Hill Mining & Metallurgical Complex Superfund Site. It is located in northern Idaho and eastern Washington, in one of the largest historical mining districts in the world. The site spans 1,500 square miles and 166 river miles. Mining operations began in the area in 1883 and continue today. Historical mining and milling methods disposed of tailings in rivers and streams. Those practices spread contaminants throughout the floodplain of the South Fork Coeur d’Alene River. Contamination also comes from large waste piles, waste rock, and past air emissions from smelter operations. Soil, sediment, groundwater and surface water became contaminated with heavy metals such as lead. The site was first added to the National Priorities List in 1983. Since then, EPA and its partners have made great progress in cleaning up contamination. The EPA partners with many the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, the Basin Environmental Improvement Project Commission, the Panhandle Health District, and others to clean up properties, mine and mill sites, areas where people recreate, and many other places where metals pose a risk.

@@ChrisRalph Thanks for the response. I just thought I'd ask your perspective on it from someone in the industry.

Doing your own assay basically means having all the equipment to do your own fire assay. And that is expensive. You can do a test for free gold more cheaply, but that will not include microfine gold.

@@ChrisRalph well let's weigh those options out?

That is frequently the case! The recycling video I did on lead was mostly lead I collected while prospecting, including metal detecting.

Thanks for the kind words.

I did not make the 2020 Phoenix GPAA show, but had made the previous ones for more than 10 years straight. No GPAA show this year so not in 2021 either. I am happy to speak at clubs and do often speak at local ones up here around Reno, but problem with clubs is that I am in town for a few days while traveling and if those are not the days when the club is meeting, it doesn't work. Clubs usually only meet once a month, so the odds are low that the meeting is the same time I am in town.

@@ChrisRalph Second Sunday of every month around 4pm. But for YOU, we’ll call one whenever your in town! Keep on educating us about all the fine geology good sir! Look forward to them.

I got mine used.

I get so many, many requests for personal help, advice, training, review, mineral ID, etc. - every day - I simply cannot get involved with all the requests. I have plenty of my own projects to work on. Watch my videos on how to identify minerals for yourself. Start with - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MpkW58ZeQlc.html Best of luck to you.

You can still buy lead bullets. Lead has been replaced in many items because it is toxic and left leaning persons in the mommy state government think you would endanger yourself if you could get lead easily.

No metal detector can see minus 200 mesh gold particles. Those are dust sized pieces.

@@ChrisRalph the size of gold carries recommend the one which is cheap and ideal for river prospecting

We have nuggets,pickers and even smaller visible gold in my area

In the US, most archeological finds belong to the government if found on government land. However this channel is about mineral finds, not really about treasure hunting. Mineral finds belong to the finder.

@@ChrisRalph Thank you!

Have some assay tests done to determine what is in the different grades of the ore.

@@ChrisRalph , 12 oz silver pt , .50 gold pt .... Have just recently discovered electrum , was a nugget about size of end of pinky , Was too light colored to be gold so I smashed it to test it lol was a mistake so I smashed it down but also broke apart as it was from crystalline electrum as I later discovered with microscope . With research I discovered that there was electrum found in my mining district,( not Colorado ) . One of two spots found in Oregon .

@@americanadventureoutdoors4213 I would suggest that you drill a hole from inside the mine [assuming you have the right tools available to you to drill such a hole] and see if it fills with water. If there is not water flowing out of the mine on its own, any water that comes up into your hole will [usually] stop at the natural water table by the laws of hydrodynamics. If, however, water is dripping down the walls or from the roof ['back' ] of the mine, then the water table is higher than the mine, and means that you are likely in the rich spot where the minerals are most concentrated. BUNNY LUCK to you on your mine! /)/) ( 'ˬ') @(>_ )-b \) \)

@@DeliciousDeBlair . Well part of the problem is there is a creek coming down the mnt on the side of said portal . The shaft runs close to it or right under it . We are geting water in the mine year round . I’m certain they were headed towards and under a breccia zone , but never made it . The gold in the district was found down to about 200 ta 300 feet , after that in the sulfide zone .

Laws vary from place to place and what a prospector might want to do varies so really tough to do because of so many possibilities. And as you said, I am not a lawyer.,

OK.

I am talking about large scale mining which your state government opposes because of its very left wing bent.

Galena is lead sulfide, when you heated it you got a sulfur smell from the sulfur in the mineral.

@@ChrisRalph thanks for responding. I got your book by the way. I’m enjoying it.

The oxidation state of the ore does not change the assay results.

Is is possible? Yes. Is it possible with the kind of lead deposits found in Iowa? No. However there is loads of glacial gravel gold in Iowa that was pushed down from Canada. See my video on Midwest gold.

Um yes I'm familiar with a glacial deposited gold in Iowa I have been extracting it for 10 years Thanks for responding to me I do watch your videos often

Lots of silver and lead mines in Utah, check out some old state reports.

I dont know that "distilling" is the right word to describe it.

Glad you enjoyed the video, but I do not offer a service to identify stuff - its way harder than you think. Take a look at my video on how to identify minerals and learn more about it. See: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MpkW58ZeQlc.html

You should wash you hands after handling them.

There are assay labs who do testing of rocks to determine the valuable metals they contain.

@@ChrisRalph What kind of test we should do test the percentage ? like XRF, XRD or any other?

I am sorry my friend, but I get so many requests every day for personal help, training, photo evaluation, etc. that I cannot fulfill all the requests. I have many, many commitments of my own that demand my time. I wish you the best of luck in your efforts. Chris

Some has much gold, but others have very little. some are in between. Not all ores have the same silver.

@@ChrisRalph inshallah i will try and see how much the percentage, thanks 🌹🌹

interesting.

4.

​@@ChrisRalph By the way, have you ever discovered any copper traces in galena? Copper is impossible to find in lead because (as far as I know) it changes into silver and gold.

I have no idea about platinum and how it might affect you. And platinum is much more expensive that silver.

Best of luck to you in your prospecting.

No idea of what it might be - there are hundreds of heavy minerals. Lots of iron ores are black.

@@ChrisRalph I will have all checked if I find a place that can do that for me in Missouri where I live

Greetings.

Best of luck to you.

When I can make the same money on Rumble, I will.

@@ChrisRalph I get that. Maybe you could have both youtube and rumble

Sorry, no.

Glad you liked it.

@@ChrisRalph 🙏💕ขอบคุณครับ

My friend, I only speak English and it appears you do not.

Please watch my videos on how to identify minerals. I do not offer a mineral ID service.