Can u order like 5 gallon bucket of material from mining company...or is there company that does this...my mom loves rockhounding and I just thought about doing this for her Christmas present...
Cause she just loves to go through this kind of stuff and find small diamonds and gold...
Big relaxer for her she says after working all day..
Thank u

Hi jsmith and welcome to Colorado Prospector!
I moved your topic to the "Wanted" section.
I think what you're looking for is "paydirt"? There are a lot of sources for this and of course a lot of poor deals out there for it. I would be leery of eBay offerings in particular unless they guarantee a certain amount of Gold in the "paydirt". Basically, all of it is spiked concentrates or spiked sand. Some are more generous and honest about the Gold amounts than others. i wish I had some personal feedback but I don't know who's ligit now.
Dan & Denise used to sell great paydirt in the Miners Market here but they are not currently listing it. Hopefully some of the members here can share any good or bad recent experiences with online paydirt vendors or any of the Colorado mines that might sell rough or paydirt. I'm not sure if the Phoenix mine in Idaho Springs does or not, they might.

You can buy material on ebay and through some of the mining websites. Crap shoot on what you'll find, but I've always thought of it like this... if the material has enough good stuff in it to make it profitable, they wouldn't be selling it, they'd be processing it themselves. So I can only imagine most deals like this are material that has already been worked over and then they just seed it with a little bit of color, at a huge profit margin. But they probably do throw a good chunk in now & again to generate buzz, as a marketing tool to get folks excited and buy more. Kind of like lottery tickets or the casino industry.

Just my assumptions, not based on fact. Maybe someone can chime in with a more fact based response.

Welcome to the forum!

Thank you

OK, I succumbed to cabin fever and bought some paydirt from a guy in Canada who sells on one of the Facebook prospecting groups. Was $20 (or $25) and $20 shipping from Canada for a 3 pound bag of #12(?) classified material. Was nice to see some color in a pan!!

I thought about doing that with the material in the areas I'm prospecting. However, the complication is the stuff I'm looking for is hard to find, harder to find than gold, and unless they know what I'm looking for, they likely won't find it. And then the notion of actually getting any visible gold out of the material is a shot in the dark.

But hey, the offer is open! And I'll only charge for shipping.

Have you gotten a chance to pan out the placer dirt that you received with your lifetime CP club membership Crusty?
Should be some good stuff in there also if your looking for color in your pan.

lol, I knew you'd ask... let's just say I have a bit of an issue with organization and might not be exactly certain where I put it.
It was after I got back from my deployment, so there's no telling what good spot I put it in so I wouldn't forget it. That was when I was just a rockhound and didn't even own a pan. I WILL find it eventually!