hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker mining metals and on today's video I'm going to be doing
something I've never ever done before I'm going to be sniping for gold platinum and chrome we're here
in western Washington and today I've been inspired by Pioneer poly another YouTuber he does a lot of
sniping up in Canada and finds some really good gold so I thought I'd give it a try so I came out
here to one of the local Creeks this is kind of a special spot because at the headwaters of this
Creek weigh up about 10 miles from here there's this huge massive body of ultramafic rock called
donite and the donite Not only they have some precious metals associated with it but it's one of
the primary minerals you look for and associated with chrome and pgms a Platinum Group metals and
so today I've come out to this Creek we're going to snipe down some of these Bedrock cracks here
we have moved some of these big boulders if we can we're gonna try and find gold maybe some
Platinum nuggets if I'm really really lucky and we're also going to look for donite with a bunch
of chrome in it but the first thing I got to do is get my wetsuit on I haven't been in my
wetsuit in probably 10 years so let's see how this adventure goes well I got my my bottoms on
and that was a workout in itself let me tell you that was a chore well I've got this new GoPro Hero
11 or whatever it's called I'm gonna give it a shot the reason why I'm going with the GoPro
is it's waterproof so I can get a lot of my shots underwater with this thing so we'll give it a try
and see how it goes well here is the kind of stuff we're looking at I really like this spot because
the foliation of the rock is perpendicular to the flow of the river right and so you're going to get
a lot of deep cracks that go perpendicular and so that gold is going to come along the Bedrock and
Boop fall right into a crack here's a good spot right here there's a long deep crack there's a
big boulder another Big Boulder so this would be a candidate we're going to work along here
if you look over here I've heard people having some pretty good luck in potholes
like this one right here there's some Boulders in there there's another pothole there that we might
get cleaned out see what we can find there's a big crack right here but you can see I've got a
whole Creek to work Bedrock on both sides there's a bunch of Bedrock there a bunch of Bedrock poking
up out of the creek I have found gold in this Creek I found a couple really nice uh pieces
up to two grams in the past long long time ago I'm cautiously optimistic that I can find some
gold here today these are some of the tools I'm going to be using I've got a little rock hammer
thing a pair of needle nose pliers that are bent the screwdriver is always nice some pliers chisel
a little bar yeah I know I should have brought a real crowbar but I couldn't find mine this morning
so the first thing is we got to get in the water I'm gonna go work that
crack right over there oh this wetsuit is so hard to move in
well my first step is getting the overburden off and I really wish I had some gloves I can
tell you that in the first couple minutes but that's okay I think between my tools and just
kind of swooshing it with the water I can get a lot of these rocks cleared out of here but
what we want to do is get right down to the very bottom of that crack the gold is going
to go all the way down to the bottom and as I fan away the overburden and the rocks
hopefully we'll see some gold show up in this crack I got down to a layer I've been washing
the gravels out of the way and they've been clean right there's not a lot of muck in them
there's not a lot of silt and fines and I've got down to a layer where the last flood has been and
it's all silty and Compact and it's a little bit clay I'll show you here what I'm talking
about and that is the layer in the past where one I found gold on top of but once you get under that
layer on the Bedrock that's where you're going to find some real good gold so let's go take a look
all right well I grabbed it tiger by the tail here I can't really tell which rock it is
that one right there
this guy right here the monster it was sitting right in our crack so I moved it out of our crack
we're gonna try and get it cleaned out now see if there's any gold but for those of you
I've never done this before rocks underwater weigh about a third to a half what they do in the air
because the water density buoys them up a little bit so this rock may weigh
400 pounds but as long as I kept it under water I worked it its way out of the crack
foreign
guys a little change of strategy I've been working that crash quite a bit I haven't found any gold
and I'm into a spot where the water's really slowed down and it's just murky and I'm spending
most of my time waiting for the water to clear so I'm gonna try and move out a little faster water
see we're gonna find some some real pronounced Bedrock cracks hopefully exposed I don't want
to just move a bunch of Rock all day so that's my goal now right behind this big boulder kind
of right in this this truck right here where it's real fast I'll show you there's a bunch of
big rocks sitting right on Bedrock so I can roll those out of the way pretty easy and then we'll
soon snipe some of those cracks if we can find any I'll tell you this it's just a lot of hard work
if they look fun and it is but man you got to want it you got to work hard for it
well I just cleaned out a big huge pothole down here kind of
right in this fast water let me see if I can show you here underwater foreign
a little bit more with the stuff that's washed down so I'm gonna work my way up the stream here a
little bit and see if I can find some a little bit more exposed crack so I'm not moving so much Rock
on the river I've been working this little pothole right here I found I found my first little piece
of the hole so let me see if I can get it on camera we sucking it up with the Snuffer bottle
all right
hopefully I got it yeah there it is
well it looks like I accidentally got two I I saw one and sucked it up and got two of them there
so that's my take for today so far but my my strategy is don't give up so I'm going
to keep going I might be getting a little bit too aggressive the Fanning on my hand I'm looking for
for big nuggets and I might be blowing out a bunch of the small stuff so let me get back in there
and see if I can find some more all right guys along with my final hole I'm worn out I'm tired
I haven't found any gold but I wanted to give you a little bit of an update here I'm at the bottom
of my last hole and if there's no gold in here I don't think there's any gold in this River at all
I worked on this crack didn't find anything right now I'm working down this crack
and I I worked my way across this way I'm at the very bottom of the hole
there were a couple of cracks down here that I dug out
there's one right along there that I dug out didn't find anything
[Music]
I've kind of got this last little bit of a spot at the bottom where it kind of comes
down this way there's the bottom of the hole there's my last little bit
I'm gonna see if there's any gold in the bottom there there's a nice little crack
right along here right along there I'm gonna dig out but I've got bedrock I've
got Bedrock all the way around The Edge this is the very bottom of the hole it's like a little
bit of a pothole at the bottom of a crack let's see if we can get in there [Music]
well nothing nothing I'm so disappointed I thought for sure I'd at least find some gold for you guys
today all we got are those two little tiny flakes I can't believe it if there was if there was gold
In this River it would have been in that crack right I mean it was a deep perpendicular crack
it had a bottom to it and sides so it's a big bowl the gold should have been right in the bottom of
that thing I I don't know why there was any gold in there and I am wiped out I've worked all day
and I guess you could say a little bit of gold is under no gold so let me get cleaned up I want to
get out of this wetsuit get warmed up a little bit and then we'll go look for some donut and
some Chrome with great effort I ended up getting dressed again and drying off I'm shivering but I'm
starting to warm up a little bit and that uh that concludes my sniping Adventure today and
just maybe another YouTuber out there will invite me up to their place so they can show me how to
snipe and we can get some real gold but now let's go take a look at some donite and I'll talk about
where it comes from and where the Chrome is in it well I wanted to talk a little bit about donite
it's a real orange color when it oxidizes and that's because it's about ninety percent
Olivine now the cool thing about donite is it's a fairly rare Rock to find on the surface this
is the piece of the mantle of the planet and it originates about a hundred miles or 160 kilometers
down underneath the surface of the Earth and so it's it's again fairly rare to have it on
the surface but we have one of the largest single deposits of donite in the Western Hemisphere here
in western Washington and this Creek drains down on one half of this deposit so we have a lot of
donite Boulders in the creek but let's go along I want to show you what happens when you break
them open and the color inside really changes dramatically now here's a great example I just
broke this one open it has the nice orange done color on the outside when it's oxidized but a
nice fresh face is nice green bright green color this is a little bit darker color but if you look
there's little black flecks in there and those little black flecks are chromite
and so this rock like I said is over 90 Olivine so it's an ultramafic Rock and and this particular
deposit is pretty much 100 all the 99 Olivine with little bits of chrome in it and so if you
can find a rock or places in the deposit there's places where it's uh fractionally crystallized and
you'll have these big bands of chromite within the donut itself and that's because as the ore body or
magma body was cooling the Chrome was denser and settled down and formed these bands in the Rock
let me see if I can find some and show you well here's a couple more I found this one has quite
a few black specks of chrome in it but it's not or grade this is an interesting one it has little
crystals in it that don't weather so I'm not quite sure what those are maybe pyroxenes I'm not sure
but it has a really nice green color once it's broke open again with those
black flecks and then here's a couple pieces I found actually while I was sniping earlier
but you can see the black band of chrome in this one this one's a little bit more distinct that's
chromite in the deposit there's actually bands that are feet wide of pretty much solid Chrome
and during World War II a lot of interest was taken into the deposit for uh Chrome to help
support the war effort but if you notice these two they don't have the done color that orange color
the other ones do these I found underwater and they haven't oxidized yet they've worn down they
have the green color on the surface so there's absolutely no weathering around so stay tuned
in a future video I'm going to take these home and slab them up in the Rocks off I've got these
I'm going to cut I've got some list one night I'm going to cut that may have some gold in it
then I've got some really really nice golden quartz stuff from our gold mine that I'm going
to slab up so stay tuned for that on a future video all right guys that does it for me today
unfortunately we didn't find very much hardly any very minuscule amount of gold but sometimes you
just don't find any gold stay tuned also for the rock cutting video coming up in the next
couple weeks and there's lots more gold mining videos to come so don't miss out on those be
sure to subscribe so you don't miss anything and thanks for watching we'll see on the next video