My main method of getting Gold is in the rivers, and is called Crevicing, which is removing material down to bedrock to hunt out the Gold in the cracks. I love capturing videos and pictures of my gold getting adventures, and over the years have collected some crazy footage on our missions in some of the most amazing remote Central Otago backdrops imaginable. With more and more interest in hobby ty
pe gold mining around the World, I thought i would use this platform to showcase and share in the adventures. So over the next while when time permits I will upload video and pictures of myself at work mining, the tools I use to find gold, and some of my innovations that help me grab more gold! My Journey started out over 20 years ago, with my best friend and I in University Holidays hearing about this older guy who lived in a stone hut in a remote Queenstown gorge, living a life of adventure hunting GOLD. This encounter started our path, and what an adventure we have had ourselves, the places and experiences we have had on our quest has shaped and enriched our life's and provided a perfect outlet to re-balance and ground oneself. At 1000m altitude it is a very desolate, remote and Hospitable place, with many of the early gold miners losing their lives to the Cold harsh environment. The dominant flora up at the Claim consists of Tussocks, Spear Grass, lichens and moss, with only the hardiest of fauna, wild deer, pigs, hare, paradise ducks, falcons and Otago skinks calling it home. There is a staggering amount of old gold mining history and workings throughout my claim. Over 1500 men and families made this their home in the late 1880s during the Otago Gold Rush with many old stone huts and shelters still identifiable, along with wing dams, water races, floating dredge lakes and stacked stones running for hundreds of meters in places. I take my hat off to them with what they must have endured but also accomplished. However they did not get it all!! My main method of getting Gold, is called Crevicing, which is where I float in a river in my wetsuit and pick out crevices and cracks in the river bottom with a screwdriver and suck up the visible gold with my converted grease gun. Where the river is too deep or it has a lot of overburden to get to the bottom, I use a Gold Dredge which has a breathing compressor that feeds air from the surface down a hose to me working underwater. It has a big nozzle and pump system which I suck all the material up to the surface where it runs over a sluice box capturing the Gold. The Claim has many different challenges the biggest is the climate. Having an altitude of over 1000m in parts the weather is unpredictable, brutal and very unforgiving, getting it wrong you can pay with your life. Just living up here can be tough, a lot of the year the overnight temperatures can drop well into the minus degree centigrade and waking up to a stiff frozen wet-suit creates all sorts of mental challenges to overcome. This is all before we go and dive into our snow-fed rivers, so having the right safety and other protective gear is crucial to keep hypothermia at bay while hunting for our Gold. Every piece of Gold recovered from this environment is hard earned Gold,
Tussock Creek Gold
