Rock Hunters on Wolfe Lake, Ontario Canada #shorts

A beautiful day Rock hunting with my son on Wolfe Lake,…

Silver Gold and Mica … mostly Mica.

There must be a Mica Mine nearby … we collected lots of very shiny rocks… but we forgot the metal detector so we left lots of Silver and Gold back in the Lake.

Will need to go back tomorrow and try again.

Watch on YouTube:

… the property north of the old Richardson mine is estimated to have about 145,000 ounces in gold reserves, according to a 2016 Ontario Geological Survey report. It is not the motherlode — after all, a modern mine cranks out 40,000 ounces a month — but it is something, especially if viewed as an indicator of perhaps bigger things to come in nearby places, and at greater depths.

Digging a shaft 15 feet down, "the seam was six inches wide at the top and was decomposed for six feet," said prospector Marcus Herbert Powell in the First Report of the Bureau of Mines, 1891. "Then it was solid rock to 15 feet, where it suddenly opened into a cave 12 feet long, six feet wide and six feet high, so that I could stand upright in it." It was a discovery that he literally fell into in the summer of 1866.

"The hanging wall was quartzite and the foot wall was granite, while the roof was composed of spar, talc and rocks of various kinds, and the floor of iron, talc, quartzite, black mica and other minerals," Powell described. The gold was interspersed throughout the rocks "in the form of leaves and nuggets, and in the roof it ran through a foot thickness like knife blades." The nuggets weren't all tiny flakes that could blow away -- "the largest was about the size of a butternut." (A butternut is approximately the size of a walnut.) The dark hollow in the earth was a cavern of riches.

Powell and his fellow prospector, William Berryman, announced their find of the newly named Richardson Mine, but people didn't believe the young men "¦ that is, until word spread far enough. Then miners streamed in from as far away as California's gold rush and the Caribou gold fields in British Columbia. To meet the urgent needs of new miners, a boom town was hastily slapped together, named El Dorado "¦ the golden one

Source : https://www.thewhig.com/2015/02/03/local-history-ontarios-first-gold-mine-near-madoc

Survey: http://www.geologyontario.mndm.gov.on.ca/mndmfiles/afri/data/imaging/31C14SW0011/31C14SW0011.pdf