I went to the Rocky Mountain Miner's Rally in Idaho Springs Colorado in June/July of last year. In that time I did a few samples of gravel and even started working a hole on the south fork of Clear Creek. I did one batch of material straight from the creek, through screens and then through the gold whel. The gold wheel is a Desert Fox. Out of the first batch I was disappointed. One *or two* specks of gold. One looked like gold but even with a loop I couldn't tell. So I set that sample aside.

Now here I am, over a year later, and I finally got a light attachment for my microscope. It's a dandy- A Millipore 'scope with 10xWF eyepieces and 4x/0.1, 10x/0.25, 20x/0.40, & 40x/0.65 attachements (ok, not being a 'scope expert I forget what they're called). Instead of buying a $260 light with a $35 telescoping arm specifically for this 'scope, I made do with 20 cents of velcro and a $12 gooseneck LED light from Alco. Works great! Even at 400X (though a bit darker)!

Anyhow, out of that sample I got this- not one but four pieces of gold. Not flakes, but not pieces. The sizes are interesting. The biggest one I had noted with my 10x loop turned out to be about 171.4 micros long. I didn't get the width (duh!). The suspected flake really wasn't a flake, but it is gold- 214. 29 microns long by 47.62 microns wide. Wire gold. And I found two more "specks" I hadn't seen before. 128.57 microns (no width measurement made) and 142.85 microns by 95.24 microns, respectively.

I cannot understand how I missed the two additional flakes as the size difference isn't much. Anyhow, what else I found amazed me- micron "float". Blacksand with gold embedded. Ok, ok. May not be gold. But it sure looks an awful lot like it to me. Except we're talking about specks that aren't even big enough to be called specks. I measured one and it's about 4 microns by 6 microns. Talk about micron gold!

I know some of you find this boring- "oh geeze! Is that ALL he's excited about?" Well, since I havn't used the 'scope in about a year and only now have a good light source for it, YEAH! Now all I gotta do is find out how I'm going to get a polorized LED and a UV LED. May help separating that into LW UV and SW UV. Until I get a thickness measurement, i think I'll pass on figuring the weight of the gold specks.


Sometime later I'll take measurements of the Arkansas River gold. Really fine stuff, but plenty of it. As soon as I find a way to take some good pics of the gold under the 'scope, I'll see what I can get made and sent out.
Carl

edit- if the micron stuff loses you, grab a calculator and divide those microns by 1000 and it'll get you the measurements in millimeters. And then divide that by 25.4 to get it in inches.

what no pics well it would be cool to see the gold that close up.... B)

I'm working on it. I have a camera, just need the software and an adapter.