feb2009

February 1, 2009 Bob, Joe, and myself went out to Franklin County to pan for gold. This was in the vicinity of the old Portis Gold mine. The gold ore was discovered at the farm of Isaac Portis in 1835 which produced $3 million before the Civil War. It was last worked in 1936. We made it over to one of Bob's favorite spots along a creek. We started off by digging in an old tailings pile that was possibly over 100 years old.

Here Bob is describing how the gold follows the shortest path of the creek. In other words the gold deposits hug the inside edge of the creek banks. The blue arrows show the direction the water is moving in the creek. The red line shows the path that the gold will take. It is along this red line that most of the panning should be done.

Bob's panning technique has been refined through decades of practice and I marvel at how fast he can pull gold from the creek. The water was absolutely frigid this day and without gloves panning would have been very difficult.

The old miners used mercury to pull gold out of the sediment when this mine was still working. And so we find mercury laiden gold as shown below. Although it looks like pure mercury, it's actually gold that is coated with mercury. We suck up all the mercury we find with the snuffer bottle as the gold can be extracted later with chemicals.

Below is just one of the very many tailings piles near the creek. There are hundreds of piles like this all throughout the area.

Well after a couple hours of gold panning we headed off to an area nearby that was suppose to have a lepidolite outcrop (purple mica). We talked to the owner of the land next to this spot to try and get a bearing on where to look. He gave us a general direction told us to stay off his property and we were on our way. Unfortunately, all we found was quartz rocks laying all over the place but no lepidolite.

The worst part was the briars. Big scary ones that can maim. It can be hard work to be a rock hound, but if we didn't do this kind of exploration we wouldn't be making much progress on our rock collection.

Feb. 14, 2009 Today I decided I would go check out an amethyst spot Bob showed me a couple weeks ago in Franklin County just inside the city of Louisburg. It's a quick 20 minutes drive from my house so I figured why not.

The Rolesville batholith seems to outcrop a lot in this area. I believe the batholithe is associated with the formation of amethyst both here in Franklin and Wake county. Below is a picture of an outcrop of the Rolesville batholith. A giant floor of granite.

It was a wonderful day. The air was crisp and cool but the sun was out in full shine. It was that perfect balance between warm sunshine and cool air and I was just happy to be outside. The area has had rain and everything was washed off nicely. So I began the hunt, head low and eyes scanning. After of few minutes of hunting all I could think was thank you Bob.