Sampling a tailings pile

[Gold:Au]

We have a tailings pile on our lease, a legacy from the lease's heyday containing maybe a couple of hundred thousand cubic yards of workings that is now overgrown and visually indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape.

This coming season we really need to find some time to do some proper sampling, and would like to know if there are better ways than just randomly digging holes.

Can anybody point me in the direction of a resource that will assist?

edit: this is a placer operation.

 

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[ConceptualizedNetherlandr]

The question at hand is how efficient were your predecessors at catching the fines. A pile that size has me guessing they got the easy larger material.

Many placers have been reworked with economic success due to technological advances and relative minerals values.

The fines are the part most likely to have evaded past capture attempts and still reside in the tailings.

Fines move relatively readily. Subsequent concentration may have occurred in specific instances/locations of the pile.

I'd look for erosion rills in the piles ( manifested as topographic valleys running down the sides) where water has carved the tailings. Water velocity is the thing that did this, and is what moves gold fines.

Sample at the base of rills where things begin to fan out into a delta. Dig deep.

I would expect to find gold there if the pile contains any.

Just a first easy step in getting an understanding of the pile composition. nature has already done some of the work for you.

Keep good records. Weigh each bucket as dug, then as dried. Then what you recovered to calculate on both dry and wet basis Oz/ton or ppm.

If you don't find gold there the 2 most likely explanations are that there isn't much in the pile or your techniques are not as good as theirs were.

 

[Gold:Au]

Thanks, good pints that I will take not of.

We are confident in the tailings for several reasons:

The people who originally worked it are still in the area and have long maintained that "real prospectors only collect nuggets, leave the fine stuff for the scavengers", a philosophy that they still very much practice today.

They also had plenty of leases to work, and the sooner they finished one, the sooner they could move on to the next. If they could double their TPH for a 50% greater daily total, then that's 50% more gold.

There is also probably 50-100% more tailings than the local workings suggest, which backs up the other old-timer's claims that they trucked the good paydirt from other leases at the end of the season when water was running scarce.

So all the fine gold is still in the pile. And if rumours are to be believed, so are many nuggets the weekend detectorists have missed when sneaking in.

What we are really needing to do is work out is how much capitol we can throw at the project.