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Post by RKC on Oct 1, 2016 12:46:36 GMT 12
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Post by oldrimu on Oct 20, 2017 22:00:33 GMT 12
I remember working in the old tailings at the bottom end of Quartz Reef Point just up river from Lowburn. In every pan there was a minimum of 8 colours, sometimes a lot more, just colours and a small flakes. With today's Highbankers it would have been easy to exploit and although I spent a couple of days there I was playing around and for every hour I worked I would have spent another hour mucking about. I remember that there was a pillar of ground standing in the middle of the tailings. I would have been about 1.5 m square and probably 6 m high. There was, about 1m from the bottom a layer of course black sand and every thing above and below was layers of gravel or silt. I realise now that that layer of BS had been laid down long before the upper layers and the 6 metres above probably contained no gold at all. I tried a number of pans from the layer of bs but found nothing at all. At the end of the river frontage there was a large tunnel that went in from the river, quite a serious operation I guess the pillar was a claim boundary maybe and I have always wondered why it remained.
The noise of my pump brought quite a number of interested persons wondering what was I was doing. One of those was Frank Wilson who had Northburn Station in those days.
This was back in the late 70's and I was a hobbiest. and would have needed a couple of ounces a week to leave my job. I had a portable underwater dredge with a Iron Horse motor that I purchased off a chap in Tyne Street Mosgiel. It worked well and I had a lot of fun times with it. I lent it to a chap who was going to copy it, he died and I never got it back.
I spent some time in the Welcome Home pub talking to a retired cop with the surname of Black. He told me that a group was sluicing up on the terrace where the herring bone terraces are. He said they worked for a some time but they stopped and walked away without having a wash up. I can't remember the reason why they stopped.
Still got the fever
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Post by RKC on Oct 21, 2017 9:54:11 GMT 12
G'day oldrimu, The pillar you refer to would have almost certainly been the claim boundary where a claim peg would have been in the ground. There were a number of these pillars left remaining in the Otago goldfields, especially in large-scale old hydraulic sluicing workings. The ground in the hydraulic sluicing's were often only going a few grains to the yard so the old miners would probably have not thought it worth their while to mine the pillars when they finished working the main claim. The best examples of these remaining old pillars are in the Bannockburn sluicing's (protected historic area) across the Kawarau river from Cromwell.  Bannockburn sluicings.  Bannockburn sluicings. Sounds like it was difficult to do a little "informal" mining in Otago even as far back as the 1970s  . Even when I was there in the 1990s there were continual problems with numerous busybody's telling us what we could not do. And then ... after the Resource Management Act was introduced, 'official' Council busybody's started flying around in helicopters on their "heroic" mission to catch a few guys making the "mistake" of trying to make a living for themselves. These days it must be just about impossible to do any "informal" mining in Otago, especially in the Queenstown Lakes district which has seen a boom in population over the last 10, or more, years! If there was no one within 100 klms of the Arrow river and no helicopters flying overhead, and I could do what I liked, and use any mining equipment I liked, I could go to the Arrow river tomorrow and get 50 ounces in a week or two (my means of mining would be a 7-inch dredge, but I would have to use at least a 6-inch dredge). Regards, Rob (RKC) |
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. Even when I was there in the 1990s there were continual problems with numerous busybody's telling us what we could not do. And then ... after the Resource Management Act was introduced, 'official' Council busybody's started