SERPENTINE GOLD QUARTZ SPECIMEN .79 GRAM NATURAL CALIFORNIA GOLD AND QUARTZ

Description

CALIFORNIA
GOLD QUARTZ
& SERPENTINE
SPECIMEN
Gold of North America
F
or natural beauty and value, few minerals in the world can rival raw, native gold straight from the earth. Here's a sweet specimen comprised of quartz, darker green serpentine, and North American gold. Occurrences like this are an anomaly. Judging by it's color, the Au is very high in purity. There's just something about the shine. It's very rare to find specimens like this with wall rock, in this case, a serpentinite rock still attached to the quartz vein. Envy the lucky man who stumbles on such a ledge. I have offered other serpentine/quartz specimens w/gold before, but those came from British Columbia. This one's from California's Mother Lode.
Here at Gold of Eldorado, you will find only genuine, natural GQ specimens with visible gold (VG). That, to the purist, the true gold aficionado, can be worth more than the value of gold in itself.
Many offerings in this Ebay category contain no naturally-occurring gold at all. I've bought specimens here that were man-made in a multitude of ways. Some sellers have been known to paint rocks with gold paint advertising them as 'natural'. Others glue 'pounded gold' onto the surface of barren quartz. This seems to be a favorite of faux specimen peddlers. Pounded gold is super-thin, 24K gold leaf usually offered in a liquid-filled vial as a novelty. You can crinkle it up, sprinkle it here and there, do all kinds of decorative things with it on a piece of quartz. Although advertised as pure, the gold is so thin and weightless that when you shake the container, the gold floats around like snowflakes in a liquid-filled Christmas globe. Many specimens listed in this category show nothing but pyrite...oodles of pyrite. If faux specimens are advertised as simulations, that's righteous enough, but when represented as naturally-occurring gold quartz specimens, anyone should be able to understand the flim-flammery.
Back when I mined full-time,
finding a curiosity like this would have made my day. If you've hunted for gold much in the field, you know what I mean. This green specimen hails from the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.
Please check my feedback for any disputes arising from non-authenticity issues. You won't find any.
For eighteen years prior to starting up this business, I was a 'lone wolf', small-scale placer miner. Wherever there was gold, running water available, and a claim to work, I dredged, sluiced, panned, and/or used a rocker-box. In the arid, water-less desert, both dry-washers and metal detectors came into play. Then, to get you to and from a claim or mountain range, one needed a truck, car, burro, jeep, ATV, or maybe their own two feet. Other provisions were food, drinking water, pick-axe, shovel, rock hammer, broom, bucket, pocket lens, gold pan, maybe a sleeping pad and bag. Many people have asked, "did you strike it rich"? Well, I found lots of nuggets, some over two ounces. I even hit short stretches of an ounce of gold a day. During my more productive seasons, there was hardly a nugget found. Recovered gold consisted of nearly all fines and amalgam.
Hardly any ex-gold miners can truthfully say they struck it rich unless you count independent living as a measure of wealth. I do and I did.
Some argue that miners release Mercury into the environment. I contend modern-day dredgers remove it. Having dredged for thirteen summers, my assertion is based on first-hand experience. In many of the hardest-worked rivers and creeks, the old miners used Mercury unsparingly. They loaded up the riffles of their sluice boxes with it because of it's affinity for gold. When Mercury and gold are both clean and excited, they have a strong molecular attraction for one another. In theory, finer gold moving down a sluice box sticks to the Mercury thus becoming an amalgam. If the gold's not clean, it probably won't stick. The Mercury would get pummeled by the barrage of dirt, rocks, silt, et al crossing over it. In this manner, a great deal of 'quicksilver' was released into the watershed where it remains in 'hundred-year-deposits' found today. These flood re-deposits are represented by the uppermost sediments washing downstream. Until the next major flood waters arrive to create major turbulence, these sediments rest temporarily closest to the surface of that stream-bed. Moving ahead to the present day. Lining riffles with 'quick' is no longer a practice utilized by any placer miners I have ever known or heard of here in the U.S. Nonetheless, you will find it difficult to convince or persuade folks who are opposed to mining by any methods that miners don't dump Mercury into watersheds any more. In their ongoing efforts to stop small-scale placer mining, they resort to perpetuating this myth that miners release Mercury into ecosystems. I can find this disinformation spread all over the internet. It would appear many people's minds are closed to the actual facts of the matter. Write your congressman asking them to consider the facts and reopen California to recreational mining.
S
pecimen weight:
.79
G
ram -
12.3 G
rains
S
ize -
10.5X8.5X7.2
mm
R
uler (if shown) is
1/4"
wide (actual size).
A
U.S. 10 cent piece is often used to show size of the item for sale.
FAST REFUND
In
case you're unhappy with this specimen, I offer a money back guarantee which includes your initial S&H.
With regards to my gold quartz parcels, gold quartz specimens, slabs, and cabochon, I only deal in rocks containing VG (visible gold), not minerals or substances that appear to contain gold or that only assay gold.
I think most of us interested in oro (Atomic symbol Au) would like to see authentic, native gold in their specimens; gold that was put there by nature's elemental forces, not by some man's hand. It's an aesthetic we share and that's what I sell - authentic, natural, gold quartz (with VG visible gold).
Weight Conversions:
15.43 GRAINS = 1 GRAM
31.103 GRAMS = 1 TROY OUNCE
24 GRAINS = 1 PENNYWEIGHT (DWT)
20 DWT = 1 TROY OUNCE
480 GRAINS = 1 TROY OUNCE
S & H
Combined shipping offered. For multiple item purchases, please request an invoice (from the seller) when you buy more than one item.
U.S. BUYERS
S & H is .00 (shipped with USPS tracking to all U.S. destinations).
Combined shipping offered.
ATTN: INTERNATIONAL BIDDERS
INTNL. BUYERS S&H - .00 (via First Class Parcel)
PAYMENTS
For U.S. buyers: We accept
paypal.
For intnl. customers: We accept
paypal.
Pay securely with
www.paypal
.
Payment must be made within 7 days from close of  auction.  We ship as soon as funds clear. If you have questions, please ask them before bidding.
REFUNDS
We leave no stones un-turned insuring our customers get what they bargained for.
If you're not satisfied with this item, contact me. Then, if the problem can't be resolved, return product within 30 days in  'as purchased' condition for a full refund (S & H included. For those who know the ups and downs of the precious metals market, this is a heck of a deal. Buy it and if the market drops dramatically in the next 30 days, you can return it for what you paid for it. That's a pretty cool insurance policy for precious metal buyers. I think most specimen buyers, however, are more interested in these rocks for their intrinsic beauty and collectability than they are for their gold content.
NATIVE MINERALS
Check any and all
Gold of Eldorado
feedback for disputes arising from non-authenticity of the specimens I sell. You won't find any. I deal in native minerals with visible gold, not replicas, not 'paint-ons'. I don't peddle 'simulated' specimens made with minute amounts of gold or no real gold at all. Nor will you find any salted pay-dirt here. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, my friend, but that's not authentic pay-dirt. Real pay-dirt is created by nature, not by a man's hand weighing out a sum of gold, then dropping it into a bucket or zip-lock bag of dirt. I was a professional placer miner priding myself on being able to locate pay-streaks both in the form of virgin pay-packs and redeposits. If I still had mining claims, any pay-dirt offered would be direct from the ground and the original deposit from whence it came. It would not be salted with extra 'color'. What gold you found inside this dirt/clay/caliche/sand/gravel et el would have been placed there by nature, not by a man's hand. I know good pay-dirt when I find it. The odds are that in a pound of bona-fide, untamper-with pay-dirt, you probably would find some gold. How much is anybody's guess. It might be only a small flake or two. It might be a couple grains of nice chunky pickers; maybe a large nugget or flake. Those are common-enough finds in real pay-dirt. The amount found would depend upon the law of averages, but mostly, on a person's luck. It would be my greedy misdeed and total lack of ethos to sneakily wave a detector coil over your dirt and remove any large nuggets from within. I would rather you found that big nugget and told your buddies. I might lose the biggest nugget ever found on my claim, but my stock would go up, my reputation remain intact, and think of the story we'd created to tell our grand-kids. All of my advertised specimens, slabs, cabochons, nuggets, gold ores are authentic and contain naturally-occurring, native gold and/or are composed almost entirely of naturally-occurring gold (i.e. gold nuggets, gold flakes, wire gold specimens). The purity of this gold will vary, but if it's from California, you can count on the percentage being fairly high, say from 70% to 95% pure. For comparision, a 14K gold wedding band is 58% pure gold.
A GOLD MINER’S FORTUNE (GOOD AND BAD)
Sometimes, it takes years of failure to learn whether a claim is worth hanging onto or not. Gold-bearing properties can be highly nuanced. There's a good chance what someone is promoting as a viable placer or lode mine holds no values at'tall. Those of us who've spent time in the goldfields have seen plenty which fit that description. Most claims in the lower contiguous 48 states which once contained good (shallow) placer ground have been hammered by three or four generations of miners. Deeper gravel deposits with undisturbed expanses could hold gold close to bedrock, but only testing can tell you that. On hard-hit, shallow-bedrock claims, your best opportunity for paying amounts of gold lies in recent redeposits or flood gold. All virgin ground, in all likelihood, has been hammered (mined) already.
So, with respect to enrichment in recent times, promoters who say a claim is replenishing itself may be describing a claim accurately. What isn't mentioned is 'how much' the claim is being replenished. No two claims are ever quite the same. Comprehensive sampling is imperative if one is ever to prove a claim.
I saw a succession of big dredging outfits hit the Trinity and Klamath Rivers back in the 1980s. One crew
working a stretch might not produce anything of note.
The next operator who happens along can
work a different bar on the same claim and pull 100 oz.
But beyond a few hidden honey holes which haven’t been plundered, these types of placer deposits are limited in scope. Once they've been sucked dry (figuratively-speaking) by the big dredges in all the most likely spots, that's all she wrote. Some promoters with feathers to sell may tell you floods have been reseeding their worthless claim. On that basis, someone might  plunk down K for a worked-out property. Don't take someone's word that a claim's replenished itself. These rich flood gold replacement deposits simply do not occur on every claim nor in every drainage. Figure out some way to test a claim before forking over big bucks. Caveat Emptor (Buyer beware) is the operative phrase. Be cautious of ‘plaster  miners’ i.e. scammers promoting barren or unworkable claims. From my past experiences, many of these claims aren't even valid to begin with. The paperwork which must be filed could be altogether erroneous and falsified. You got to check these things out thoroughly, thoughtfully. Even if the drainage runs through a lot of old tailings and virgin high bar, another hundred years probably would not bring down enough new gold to replenish your claim to profitability even if gold went to 00 per ounce.
Occasionally, one finds a river or creek with outstanding surface redeposits, 'one hundred year gold', or 'flood gold'. What also happens sometimes is that gold, if present at all, will be concentrated on or near bedrock surrounded by packs of behemoth boulders. How are you going to test bedrock with twenty or thirty feet of overburden above it and boulders the size of VWs down there? You might get lucky enough to acquire a shallow-bedrock claim holding both surface and bedrock deposits with 'high bar', bench gravel potential to boot, but nobody knows until it's been tested. Whether you're twenty feet underwater working a boulder pack on bedrock or opening up an ancient terrace five hundred feet above the river-bottom, breaking into 'the bank', i.e. pulling big rocks out of the way so you can access the gravels around and amongst them will undoubtedly pose challenges you had never forseen, were never told about, and very possibly will not be able to be overcome.
G
old of
E
ldorado
3-10-13