Are these hill scrapings part of a placer gold operation of the past?

[arthos]

So researching my local area, I started noticing large sections of the have been scraped many years ago. I'm not familiar with it can anyone tell me if this was done in search of eluvial gold? Or is this simply an attempt to cut down on wild fires perhaps? If it was done for mining is this practice done for other minerals besides gold? There are records of gold prospects in the area but no mention of these scrapings in the description of the workings. They all talk about mines/pits/ and trenches, but not the surface scraping. Does this process have a specific name in mining?

Regarding the trenches cut in the hills, this is from an old gold prospect best i can tell is from the late 30s. Though the scraped hills were not mentioned in the report on the claim, possibly that happened later. If these were modern workings My guess would be they scraped the hills in order to run a metal detector over it, however i see sections of hills that are scraped like this with no records of claims being filed on them.

Thanks guys! Watcha think? I've never metal detected, but if they were scraping the surface then taking that material else ware for processing then it seems to me these may be good places to wave a detector over.

 

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[Hoser John]

Kind of looks like fire reclamation to try and prevent erosion?John

 

[IMAUDIGGER]

Kind of looks like fire reclamation to try and prevent erosion?John

If that was the case, they would be parallel to the slope, not running down the hill.

I have never seem anything like that.

 

[arizau]

I too have never seen anything like that. I can't tell for sure but they do look like trenches. If they are then the operators could have pretty much trenched straight up or downhill in parallel lines and set the overburden to the side while extracting a pay layer from the bottom of the trenches. If the mineral was gold then using a metal detector on the top of the stacks or the bottom of the trenches could be worthwhile.

Good luck

 

[Clay Diggins]

That's all private land. No exploring there without permission. The nearby mining claims on that little bit of BLM managed land are the pegleg group.

Unless you look through the public records at the County Recorder's Office you won't find any claims that were active before 1980. The BLM joined the game late and wasn't notified of claims before 1980.

Heavy Pans

 

[arthos]

That's all private land. No exploring there without permission. The nearby mining claims on that little bit of BLM managed land are the pegleg group.

Unless you look through the public records at the County Recorder's Office you won't find any claims that were active before 1980. The BLM joined the game late and wasn't notified of claims before 1980.

Heavy Pans

Sounds like you have some personal knowledge of the area Clay. I have been researching the areas old diggings with this division of mines bulletin from 1959. So if those hill scrapings are from mining operations perhaps they happened after 1959 and before 1980. I've still never seen the top layer of entire hills plowed like that, and I am curios if the purpose was indeed placer mining related regardless of accessibility. Its to bad, I spent a good amount of time as a youth dirtbike riding and off-roading through those very hills especially the eastern edge which is now plowed flat and covered with housing developments. That PegLeg link was quite the gold story hahaha =D Just enough historic and geological fact to keep you intrigued!