https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56MrNa7vg18
For a bunch of his detailed information in the mines but I learned from him and since the class I’ve been out to his place a few times and so I have enough that I can present a Liberty gold lecture and now I have a Liberty Gold lecture for my class and it goes a little something like this. So there is gold up in Liberty but there are two very different deposits. Right off the bat we have to realize there is not one place you’re finding all the gold in Liberty. There are two distinctly different apples and oranges that we are talking about here and to sketch that here is a cross-section. So here is some people and it’s a sunny day and here is US 97 we’re driving North up the Blewett Pass, we’re driving right up the valley bottom in Liberty and Liberty is right off the road and there are hills up above Liberty. So up in the hills there are hard rock mines, gold coming right out of bedrock and there are tunnels up there in the hills. Tunnels that are right in the hard rock and they’re finding gold, they’re finding crystalline gold, they’re finding very rare wire gold. Only a few spots on this planets do you have this very rare wire gold these crystals of gold.
So that’s up there and Rob’s has one of those mines, Rob also has a mine down here in the valley bottom. So apples and oranges; two completely different stories but both have the gold. So down here in the valley bottom there are placer operations, you may have heard that term – Placer mine. So these are gold deposits that are in nuggets, not the wire now but the wire has been compacted into these gold nuggets and the nuggets are underneath a bunch of river rocks. So in other words the gold has been moved into the valley bottoms and you can collect gold, you can find gold, you can money off the gold if it’s down in the valley bottoms. So let me be a little bit more specific now, up here in the hard rock area the mines are almost always associated with a wall of lava rock. So this is basalt it’s a dyke we are going to talk about this more on the next sketch I have for you. And the mines, then the hard rock are in black shales; where the black shales intersect the walls of basalt rocks. So this is brown basalt and black shale, the mines are right in that context. Right where the shale meets the basalt, let’s put that in our mind and hang on to that for a bit.
Down here low, let’s enlarge that, what does that look like? The bedrock that is below US 97, that’s below the Liberty cafe, that’s below a lot of places is the shale. That same shale which is 50 million years old and right on the top of the shale and in fact in the upper one foot of the shale in the cracks at the top of this shale the gold is sitting down in those little nooks and crannies. These nuggets that were brought in by water, they are sitting in the upper 1 ft. of the shale and sitting on top of the shale is on average 50 ft. of river gravels. And so you go “okay well I guess these guys are like going through this 50 ft. of river gravels to look for gold”. Are they going through the whole 50 ft.? Gold is heavier than the rocks, so the gold is typically at the bottom. The nuggets are in the bottom 2 ft. of the river gravels and in the upper 1 ft. of the cracked shale. So this is the pay layer, let’s get beneath these river gravels or gravels that were deposited during the ice age and let’s get above this black shale and we will be doing fine there as well.
So the placer operations in the valley bottoms, bottom of the river gravels, the gold up in the high country where the shale meets the lava rock. Do you have it so far? In a way what I am doing is setting the stage for these discussions and also setting the stage for the visuals because we are going to see mine shafts in shale up high. We are also going to see mine shafts where the walls of the tunnel were river rock. So tunnels and tunnels we have to keep straight where we are; we’re in the valley floor or we’re up high. Let’s talk about the placer stuff a little bit more; we will throw in a couple new ideas. Do you know how to get to Liberty? You jump on 97 and you head to Blewett Pass. Let’s make a quick map. So here is Blewett Pass, US 97 up and over Blewett Pass (8:34-37 unclear) back to Blewett Pass. This is the road coming down north south and then we eventually get down here. So this is 97, Ellensburg is down in the floor, 97, Ellensburg, get to Lauderdale Junction of (9:15 unclear). We have the intersection of 97 is coming in from (9:18 spelling) and then we are continuing up, we have a landmark on the left; that’s the Liberty cafe, we have a landmark eventually up on the right; that’s the Old Mineral Springs Resort and eventually we get up and over Blewett and on the (9:33 spelling).
Williams Creek is coming in from the north east and the town of Liberty sits on Williams Creek which is about half a mile off 97. So there is a town of Liberty, people live in Liberty it is not a ghost town people are still living there, people are still mining there, people are still finding gold it hasn’t all been taken. So it’s not a ghost town story, it’s still a community. Swauk Creek basically follows the road or the road follows Swauk Creek coming down from Blewett Pass and Swauk Creek eventually leaves the road and jumps into Hidden valley and then eventually enters into the Yakima River upstream from the Hal Home Center. The river gravels, remember we care about the river gravels, we care about that 50 ft. of gravel because it’s sitting on top of what (10:37 laughing). Those gravels and this is just a general map that I have seen from (10:47-49 inaudible) is a wonderful writer and has compiled an amazing collection of historical photographs and stories from the old times and he had a nice diagram in there showing – so I am just going to casually do this, in other words those 50 ft. of river gravels are not exactly where Swauk Creek is today. So there is this old river channel varying off into the hills this way, varying off into the hills this way. It’s sometimes right next to the road, it’s sometimes 100 yds. off the road and sometimes it crosses the road. The river gravels and again why do we care? There is gold at the bottom of those gravels.
So this idea of river gravels, stream channels is what we want and every one is quite clear in the geologic community those river gravels were deposited during the ice age. Those river gravels, that 50 ft. of river rock was brought there in these channels during the ice age which to us means the last 2 million years. The last 2 million years we have this 50 ft. of big, rounded river gravels sitting on top of that. Now as a geologist without knowing anything about that area, when I first started going out there I was saying this doesn’t quite work for me, this is not that big of a drainage and there is no glaciation that we have record of in the upper valleys south of Blewett Pass. We’re on the dry side of the rain shadow effect off the cascades, this is not a place for huge glaciers and yet we’ve got a lot of stuff, gravels during the ice age sitting on top of the nuggets of gold. I was puzzled about this and I am still slightly puzzled about it but I dug and found a few old maps and Richard Waitt who is a respected geologist did some mapping in the 1970s. And his call was that the glacier… This is ice, this is not controversial. Early in the ice age there was a glacier that came down from Snoqualmie Pass, came down Interstate 90 over (13:02 spelling) and that ice made it all the way to Swauk Prairie.
A glacier from Snoqualmie Pass all the way to this area where 97 and 970 come together, it’s called Swauk Prairie. There’s glacial terror, there’s marines, there’s a whole bit right there. So if it was a big thick glacier, so here is the idea I am working on; we’re videotaping it so I guess this is all official “I’m working on it, not a 100% sure” but Waitt and others think that these gravels are actually out washed. If you were with us two weeks ago we talked about out wash in Seattle, where a bunch of river rock is coming off the front of a retreating glacier. So it’s tempting to say “oh we got all these river gravels and the river is heading south today, so that must mean that all this ice age river gravels came down the drainages. I’m starting to think that it is out wash from this retreating glacier that came up the valley. That all this 50 ft. of river rock that you will see in a second was coming from this glacier originally and again we’re probably a million years ago maybe even a million and a half years ago when we’re laying all this stuff in. Now am I saying the gold is coming from the glacier? I’m not, this is something I learned yesterday morning and this is how fresh this information is.
So I had Rob come in I ran this lecture by him and he said “(14:24 unclear) hold it now, hold it”. The nuggets at the bottom of the ice age gravels, the gravels may very well be from the out wash which is this pet idea which you have and I think the gravels came in long before the ice age. So the gravels are being washed out of the hills. Sometime between 47 million years ago which we’re going to see in a second which is when we think the gold was deposited until about 2 million years ago and then we do this ice thing and basically bury these nuggets of gold in these old river valleys. Okay whether you like that or not we are moving on. We’re going to go up into the hills now with your permission. Now if this was a classroom and you were a smaller group we would take time and have question and answer right now and we’d talk and we would get your feelings out and your emotions and your grandma did all this. Not today we are moving right on, you are too big a group.
Now, bedrock, we have to totally change our viewpoint. We are now up in the hills, let me test you; what rock are we finding the crystalline gold in? It’s in hard rock. What kind of rock? It’s in shale which is right next to basalt. So let’s put this into context, we did an Ellensburg Blue Agate lecture here a couple of years ago and some of these are going to be the same units. We’re not talking about blue agates tonight but there is a loose connection between these two topics; blue stuff that’s valuable and gold stuff that’s valuable. This should be familiar let’s do it quickly. 93 million year old granite, 150 million year old serpentinite those are the oldest two bedrock layers in the Mount Stuart area. These have a whole story to themselves but we are not talking about that tonight, 50 million years ago Washington was relatively flat. This is 50 million years ago, long before the cascades started to grow. So we have a flat Florida here warm like tonight, humid, vegetation all sorts of evidence that this was Florida 50 million years ago including Liberty Florida.
And in that swampy low land we are depositing thousands of feet of sediment. Thousands of feet of sand stones and shales that collectively are a part of this Swauk formation. So I am just going to focus on the shales here. Sand stones and shales, we don’t care about the sand stones tonight they are not going to be helpful to us but the black shales are. Some say up to 5000 ft. if you really look at the total thickness of this, 5000 ft. of Swauk formation which is alternating sand stone shales; it’s the shales that are going to host our gold in a second, 47 million years ago there was an event, a very dramatic geologic event and that event involved cracking the crust and having lava come up through the cracks. That’s crack the crust, we cracked right through that granite, we cracked right through the Swauk formation, we cracked through the granite and the serpentinite, we crack, we crack and we crack. There are more than 50 individual cracks that you can still find today and you go “oh that’s cool, I want to go up there and find those cracks and look down them”.
They are not open cracks; why not? Because lava came up, Hawaiian like magma surged up to the surface through those cracks and a major series of lava flows flooded the surface. Let’s put ‘V’ here for volcanic. This is the Teanaway basalt, 47 million years old. The Teanaway basalt basically burying the Everglades in lava and this is Florida, so we are taking this swamp and we’re just burying it with a thick section of basalt lavas. Sitting on top of this is Roslyn coal, sitting on top of that are the Columbia River basalt lava’s and other things but we’re not talking about that, so we’re going to stop our story here. The gold is being deposited only in the black shales near these cracks because remember that the cracks are filled with basalt lava. Where are the hard rock mine tunnels? They’re right here next to these cracks. So if you’re looking for gold and you’re looking for new places to find gold deposits, wire gold crystals up in the hills. You are looking for these feeder dikes and that’s what we call them. A dike in geology is a crack that’s filled with lava that cuts across other layers and that’s clearly what we have here.
So these Teanaway way feeder dikes are important to this story because they are hosting this gold. Is the gold in the granite? Is the gold in the sand stones? Is it in the Teanaway basalt itself? No. It’s just in these areas next to these dikes, more on this in just a second. I do however want to enlarge one of these spots, so this could be any of these little dots here. Now let’s look carefully at the gold. I am just going to enlarge one of these places where the shale is intersecting one of our feeder dikes. So here is our basalt feeder dike and next to it is our black shale; not the sand stone, the shale. Let’s get our mind in here, let’s get Rob in here or Ollie Jordan back in 1932 and what we are looking and I am going to enlarge this now. I am going crazy with my enlargements here; in the wall of the tunnel in the shale are cracks. These cracks are different, these are like veins in the shales and in the veins is the mineral calcite. A soft mineral not a corts vein most of us know veins that are full of corts. These are veins full of calcite and that is probably not an accident and the shale is carbonaceous, the shale is carbon rich and so it’s natural for us to develop calcite growth instead of corts growth in this setting.
Why do we care about the calcite? It’s not just calcite in the veins, its gold. The gold is with the calcites which are in the cracks, which are in the shales, which are next to the Teanaway feeder dikes. Now you want to know what I want to know; why is the gold only forming here? Why isn’t in the sand stones? When precisely did it come in? Did it come in right when this system was hot? That’s what I have been trying to figure out in the last three days, I’ve been emailing all sorts of people who know this stuff and we had a little chat back and forth and there are ideas that we need hydrothermal solutions. We need hot fluids to collect some of this gold and redeposit it in these spots and so there were discussions amongst really smart folks who know a lot amount these systems that maybe we had the hydrothermal systems right along these dikes because the dikes are pretty big. And maybe we are just collecting the gold and depositing it in the carbon because it’s a better trap, better host than the sand.
The sand as too many pores in it or another guys says “well maybe all these dikes are so together that as they propagate there way north” in other words as the lava is trying to get to the surface in each of these feeder dikes, we’ve just cut a big halo, a big zone of hot water pushing up in front of it. Like a big moving washing machine essentially, it’s washing the Swauk formation clean and depositing the gold in the shale and so on. That’s a question mark. Exactly why that gold is where it is but you’ve got information none of the rest of this is questioned mark that’s for good. So let’s get rid of this okay. I have one more sketch and I guess I’m going to do it. I’m going to erase this quick and I’m going to do another sketch real quick because I want to show you that the system today does not look exactly like this. There has been some folding, these layers have aren’t flat they have been tilted and the tilting, the folding is the last part of this discussion. Quick cross sections now, let’s go south to north. So Blewett Pass is to the left, Ellensburg is to the right and let’s put the Liberty Cafe in here as a landmark to Swauk Creek. So we are driving along Swauk Creek up valley to Blewett Pass and here is the sky line now, here are the hills behind the Liberty Cafe.
And as we will see in the photos in a second across the street from Liberty cafe is some bedrock and that’s the Teanaway way basalt. It’s not flat it’s tilted and most of its gone. So let’s fill some miners in here and here is people walking around in the hills above Liberty, Liberty is down here. You get to the top of the hills above Liberty and you are below where that Teanaway basalt lava, remember the lava that buried the Everglades most of its gone. Where are the Blue Agates coming from? The Blue Agates are coming from pore spots within the Teanaway basalt, so most of that is gone. I wonder where all that stuff went? It got moved into the (24:49 unclear) valley and that’s why we have Blue Agates in our valley. That was a couple of years ago, the lecture couple years ago. Coming down out of the Teanaway basalt are what? The feeder dikes. The vertical walls of basalt lava and in Liberty those feeder dikes, the basalt walls are just going right to the top of the hills and stopping; but did they really stop? They continued originally to feed the Teanaway basalt lava; do you get the picture? There used to be a lava flow carrying this whole scene, most of its gone and the upper part of the feeder dikes is also gone but the gold, Rob’s mine and the other hard rock mines are on opposite sides of the feeder dikes close to the tops of the hills because we are below that system.
So the last thing I want to show you is that, I am going to sketch in our black shale because we know that’s where the gold is found and I’m going to put another black shale in here. So the whole Swauk formation has been folded and most of the gold. I need shale right next to the basalt. Most of the gold is towards the middle of the fold. Here is my point, this is the fold axis, this is the middle of the anticline and Rob and others report that the hard rock mines are productive in the Liberty area if you are in the middle of an anticline, not out here. So here’s shale, here’s a feeder dike but no gold. Most of it is in the middle of the axis, the middle of the fold itself and just to help you confirm that that works for your head. Remember the cracks in the shale that are going to fill with calcite and gold, perhaps the cracks are the result of the fold. Maybe we are taking these brittle layers and we are warping them and cracking them, tensional cracks and allowing a host for the gold’s that are passing through and that’s just my idea. There could be some cracks from the hydrothermal story and everything else but this is the concept we want that it’s not flat anymore. So when you drive and see the Liberty cafe off to your right there is going to be the Teanaway basalt and you go “hey that used to go way up and it doesn’t anymore” and then as you continue driving north you are below the Teanaway, you are in Swauk – 50 million year old stuff and it’s only the placer stuff that is down below. So that is the last thing that we can add.
To get the placer deposits, the river gravel stuff we have to wash this stuff down to the creek and get it underneath about 50 ft. So you are here, we are going there, if you’ve hit the Stuart Range you’ve gone too far. Now Liberty is not alone, this is Liberty but there are other places that gold has been mined for the last 150 years in Washington. Very difficult to say what is common between these other gold mines. I can’t say that they are the same story as what I am peddling tonight but I can say there is no gold here because we are under 2 miles worth of basalt lavas that are much younger. We don’t have gold mines here because this is the Puget lowlands and we had glacial deposits. So it is a rare chance for us to get out of the Columbia River basalts to get into this 47 million year old story. So let’s leave Ellensburg and let’s head up on 97 and we are heading here to the Swauk drainage and the Swauk mining district. Here is Rick Spencer flying a drone there is a familiar landmark for you, that barn on 97 and we’re heading north dropping into Lauderdale Junction and then we’re heading here, we all know where we are talking. So there is a landmark and across the street from the landmark is the Teanaway basalt. Not flat and projects up into the heavens because most of it has been eroded away.
Liberty gold, Liberty Washington, people still living there since 1873. Gold was first discovered then and has been steadily producing gold since then. Some beautiful old photographs from West (29:28 spelling) book. This is the book that I will point out West when we’re done in case you want to chat with him about this book but he’s got a treasure trove of wonderful old photographs from Liberty through the years and he has also collected lots of stories from the old timers and their tall tales. So the point is it’s not all in the past, there is still gold and there is still mining. So this is one of Rob’s operations; what do you think placer down low or hard rock? Well I heard both, these are what river rocks look like. So this is placer, we’ve tunneled into the river gravels and this is one of Rob’s mines. We’re under the river gravels but on top of the shale; remember the pay layer at the bottom of the ice age gravels but on top of the 50 million year old shale. So let’s walk in here, we’ve had some film crews out there since then so this is one of the entrances to these elaborate tunnels that were all dug back more than 100 years ago. Rob is working tunnels that were already in establishment from this hard work by hand and candle light more than 100 years ago but there is new techniques now that Rob and other people who are doing placer operations are using. So he has electricity now instead of candles, he has a bob cat instead of a shovel and he has a metal detector instead of what they used then.
So this was back in May, so it’s pretty sloppy. There was an actual winter last year so there was a lot of snow melt coming into the tunnels etc. and occasionally Rob and some friends used their bob cats to jack hammer into a wall and expose a little bit of the pay layer and then haul that stuff out to process. So setting up some lights for some QV work and we’re standing in a portion of the tunnel that they used that bob cat to enlarge by about 10 ft. just the weekend before and again; what happens to that rock? Get it out of the mine and run it through a wash plant which I’ll show you in a second. Again we are in the valley bottoms, we’re in the river gravels, and we’re in the placer operations. So we’re going to see this process of washing the gravel. So here is a bucket full of stuff that came out of the mine. Most of it is worthless, most of it is these river gravels that don’t have any value at all but in that shovel full is some gold, some nuggets; so how do you get to that stuff? You have to sort it out. You have to use sluicing equipment… an operation that Rob has here a big (32:19 unclear) gold burn operation to get that material and sort things out by size using the physics of water and other things to eventually get down to a couple of nuggets.
So this is a montage put together by Rick Spencer and we have running water getting the bigger stuff off to the base, you will see in a second how this works. This is all right next to Highway 97 you drive by it every time, So these are rocks that aren’t going to be valuable but they may can be sold or used for building a road or something like that. Again we are trying to get down to the finest nuggets, the finest particles that are the valuable nuggets. So now we are down to that level out that big shovel full that you saw just a second ago we are now down to one nugget. Like a kid Rob gave me the chance to discover on my own so here is the one little nugget out of that one shovel full that came out of that mine that you just saw but there is more gold there. That’s the one nice nugget and that nugget is this wire gold up high that is moving and getting compacted. So it does not form as a nugget, it’s originally the crystalline gold. Now we are even finer here, we’ve got this astro turf and all this really fine stuff settling out of this water solution. Again this is part of the wash plant and now we are down to it might as well be 1881, we are panning for gold now and that’s the last part of this process to get down to this finest particles and to get gold pieces, gold flakes etc.
So this is the guy you are going to hear from and ask questions from in just a second, he is sitting in the front row probably embarrassed that we are showing this of him. This is a little longer than it needs to be but we’re going to eventually show a few little extra gold nuggets that are at the bottom of this pan. So he has had luck as many of these folks have had luck through that process. So not all the old timers grabbed all this stuff they were wonderful in what they were doing and they took the obvious stuff but there is still a lot of gold that can be found. Here is a good shot of these 50 ft. of river gravels and so: is there gold here? No there is not, there is only gold in the bottom 2 ft. of this and in the upper 1 ft. of the black shale that forms the floor of this. I borrowed this from Rob actually but here are some of these channels, remember I was drawing these ice age channels are actually channels that may be older than that, that we are bringing the gold down and that were buried by the glacier out wash doesn’t quite match up with the current drainages that we have. So today we’ve got more work and we’ve got more (35:16 unclear) building a new tunnel sometimes let’s just get rid of the gravels a different way to get down to the pay layer.
So here we are at a different spot down low and this is stuff that we have to get rid of. So what do you do with all this rock? You have to move it somewhere so that you can get to the valuable stuff in the pay layer at the bottom of this 50 ft. of river gravel. Again these gravels came in during the ice age; is my idea correct? I don’t know now but is this all stuff that got brought in from that melting glacier at Swauk Prairie, I think it’s distinctly possible. The crowd likes this one because it’s gold for goodness sake and more gold all from the placer operations. Look at these beauties up to 16 ounces from the placer, from the bottom of the river gravels or tucked into the cracks at the top of the black shale and Rob is right there by the Highway. So he visits with all sorts of folks who stop and this is the film crew from Seattle and PBS that we’re trying to learn from him and they were just as into it as anybody else even though they are from Seattle they were very excited. I took the film crew inside there is all this elaborate rock work that was done by Chinese workers more than 100 years ago to stack these rocks along the sides of the tunnels and this is Rob on the right and a guy named Mark Corbly who passed away last year. He spent 35 years working in the glacier deposits primarily and on his last day out there mining found his biggest discovery.
So that was a wonderful way to end a long mining career, so here’s to Mike. Okay switch gears, very quickly we are leaving the placer, we are leaving the valley floor, we are going up to Flag Mountain which is one of the hills up above the town of Liberty. So this is hard rocks, switch your mind around now. We are done with the ice age stuff and we’re into the shale that’s next to the feeder dikes. So this is in the (37:30 unclear) just looking at the Swauks, the (37:32-35 unclear) shales that have these beautiful fossils within them, there is layers of sand stones and here is the black shale in a nice big section. Those are the layers that we are talking about here. This is Washington 50 million years ago by the way; Florida flat, the West Coast of Washington 50 million years ago is Seattle, the South Coast of Washington that’s an interesting idea maybe (37:57 spelling) or something. And in that Swauk formation we got all these wonderful fossils that tell us that it was a very different climate than it is today. But 47 we know it happened, 47 million years ago here is our event, here is the cracks and here is the basalt squirting up through the cracks cutting across these other layers, you can see it as clear as day. Basalt squirting up but this is sand stone so there is no gold here we need that black shale remember and we need the black shale next to the Teanaway basalt in the core of an anticline and that’s really what we want.
So we’re between Table Mountain north of town and Mount Stuart – this whole story is taking place here. The gold is underneath this, the gold if it ever was here has been eroded away. So the Teanaway itself are these dikes, we’ve already got the concepts. Here is an animation showing lava coming up 47 once it gets to the surface this Teanaway lava is burying the surface, it’s burying the Everglades and the black shale is down here next to that (39:05 spelling). So this is a beautiful old geologic map that I just found yesterday on the internet, 1903 George Otis Smith, he was on horseback. This is Liberty, this is up 97 didn’t exist at the time of course over Blewett Pass; what’s every one of these red lines? A feeder dike, every one of these red lines is one of these squirts of lava up one of those cracks. Now the feeder dikes in the Liberty area are trending generally East west, the rest of these feeder dikes trend Northeast – Southwest maybe the East west trend of these dikes mean gold and maybe these guys don’t mean gold maybe Rob can talk about that. I just shared this map with him maybe he saw it for the first time and so we’re kind of processing this as well as Chris Matheson and a few others who have looked at it. This is an older map showing the Teanaway basalt its dipping a different direction because we are looking differently. Here is the Teanaway feeder dikes, here is the folded sand stones and shales.
North of Ellensburg, we’re north of the Teanaway basalt, we’re into the Swauk and we’re trying to get up high. So let’s actually get to a couple of these hard rock mines before we quit. So here is Rob taking me up on a beautiful June or July day I forgot and we are up with the shale and the sand stone and this is what he is pulling out of that mine. This is what wire gold looks like, it looks very different than those nuggets. This is original gold, crystalline gold, gold crystals and they are growing; I know this looks like corts but they’re growing in this mineral calcite and remember the calcite is forming in those fractures in the shales next to the basalt. So if you can dissolve the calcite away you’re left with this beautiful wire gold in its rarest form, actual size and view through the eye piece. So there is old mines that Rob has gotten is hands on, papers of the old mines and consulting work this is the Ollie Jordan mine and Ollie was a guy who had great luck back in the 1930s and this general area had more strikes in the mid-1950s and some of this gold is now in the Smithsonian in Washington DC.
Now let’s go into one of these mines and hopefully this looks different; does this look different to you? These aren’t the river rocks anymore. This is hard rock now we are into the Swauk sand stone originally so these walls are made out of the sand stones and that is not going to work for us. So there is a calcite vein but they don’t have any gold in them because we’re in the sand stones; where do we need to get into? We need the shale, so we have to go deeper into the tunnel to get to the shale and once we get into the black shale then some of the veins are going to have some of this wire gold within them. So here is Rob giving me a quick tour obviously they have picked out the wire gold but this is the place to re-work if you have the resources, great shot from Rob. Black shale, calcite, wire gold growing in the calcite beds and this was known back in the 1870 – 80s so they were digging those tunnels back then and finding the great stuff and those tunnels are still up there as well. So Rob is re-working tunnels up high and he is re-working tunnels down low. Calcite veins, wire gold within them, calcite veins filling the cracks that potentially, still not sure about this one, potentially from the folding of this rock sedimentary series. Okay you get the idea beautiful stuff. Whole sections of this, just a little bit of human history them I am done with this portion.
So the Jordan family goes way back in the Liberty Lore, father and then three sons and then their sons etc. and the whole family was involved and Ollie who is the guy who had the mine that we just visited. This is a beautiful taken of him by West in the early 70s, you recognize this right and this is the Fairgrounds in Ellensburg next to the Rodeo when they had the gold mining panning thing back then in the early 70s. So this is late in Ollie’s life but in 1932 he made a great strike and he bought this mine from another guy who didn’t have any luck with the mine. And so the guy thought that he would just make out like a bandit and he sold this lemon mine to Ollie and within a couple of weeks Ollie had this huge haul of all this beautiful gold that he just pulled right out of (43:53 unclear) which is wire gold just waiting for him. And so there was this great turn around and rejoicing and it was big news not only locally but there was a news reel that was shot in 1932. October/ November of 1932, gold strike at the Ollie Jordan mine or something like that and Rob and others probably West would love to find that old news footage. I have been on YouTube and I’ve written a few archives places trying to find this 1932 discover gold in the Swauk with this Hearst Metronome news business but we haven’t found anything yet. So if you’re gifted with that kind of thing and you could help us out that would be appreciated. So back into the 50s we’ve got cousins and we’ve got brothers and we’ve got sons who are hauling out all sorts of this wire gold and other crystalline gold from the mine. Here is Clarence, brother of Ollie at the Diamonds mine which is just next door also in the same mountain from the Ollie Jordan mine and the daily record here in Ellensburg would have splashes occasionally if a big.