Screamer Mine Gold

The Screamer Mine, located in the South Mother Lode of California is both an epithermal and hydrothermal deposit. Millions of years ago, perhaps hundreds of millions years ago cracks formed in the earths crust/sedimentary layers of slate from earthquakes, volcanic activity and/or other geological events which also had a high quantity of iron in the slate. Some time after, a disruption deep below the earths crust forced up a quartz body into the cracks in the layers of iron rich slate and filled those cracks. Think of it like toothpaste being squeezed into the cracks between the slate. At some time after that, a hydrothermal event happened bringing super hot, highly mineralized liquid in solution which penetrated into the quartz body and it was the perfect condition…..and gold started growing within the quartz. We call this a “Stanley Steamer event”. The vein runs between 2’ thick to over 25’ thick and gold is found throughout the entire vein (hanging wall and foot wall). Most of the gold is crystalline and/or crystalized with the rare wire gold specimen. It is found in large pockets, sometimes even massive pockets. This makes for incredible specimens and even more incredible jewelry grade gold/quartz for cabochons, rings, pendants and other jewelry. The gold averages 90% purity in its natural state, is bright, stunning and has some very unusual characteristics when exposed. Because the deposit is close to the surface, most of the sulfides typically found in lode deposits has dissipated through oxidation. The mine was found back in the 1870’s, was dormant from about 1890 to 1929 when a small group of miners (very inexperienced) started mining it again and mine it until 1933. We found a lot of wine bottles from the 1930’s so apparently they liked to drink on the job back then. The mine was virtually lost to time for nearly the next 80 years until we found the remnants of tailing piles, then located a shaft and found the deposit. Initially, we did not know the quality of the mine until we detected the tailing piles and found 23 loaded rocks with gold the first day we ran a Gold Monster 1000 detector. The mine is named the Screamer Mine for three reasons, one is that our dog would scream in excitement when going to the mine and two, we tend to scream when we find large deposits. The third reason is just 3/4 of a mile from the mine, giant footprints were found in the middle of the dirt road (about 18” in length) and was barefoot. This lead us to creating the Sasquatch logo which is now……..The Screamer Mine.