You say you are blasting when there are storms. How often is there thunder storms that allow you to blast and if so you would have to have your blast holes all drilled ahead of time and explosives in place to time the blasting with the storms etc. Is that what you are doing? In the raining season there are storms every day, often in the afternoon or evening. All holes drilled ahead of time, and charges in place, linked with primacord. I just wait for the storm to arm the electric blasting cap, and when the thunder hits, bang. The placer site is away from the current vein site, which I think is not the main vein, in the vein site I mainly cut rock with little noise and small charges. In the placer I 'soften' the spots with bigger charges.
Can you give some kind of an idea of what the terrain is like where you are trying to set up your processing area? If you can grind the ore down could you use a dry wash sluice to separate the free gold from the ground ore? You would still need electric power of some sort though for a blower for the dry washer. The placer is like an old river beach. The vein site is in inclined terrain. Dry or wet I need power of some type. Doing this by hand is good exercise, but slow. The best solution so far, would still have me bringing fuel to the site regularly, which would be time spent not mining.
How much ore do you want to crush/grind down, process in a day? Not sure if where you are you can dig yourself a little hidden semi sound proof work area but if you are you could dig yourself an L shaped tunnel into the side of a cliff as long as it's stable enough. If you work on the inside of the L around the corner, not much of the noise you make will exit that L shaped tunnel cause the sound waves will more hit the other wall and stay in the tunnel. It will dissipate and be a very muffled sound on the outside of it. And if you can hang some heavy cloth or burlap or whatever over the exit hole then that too will dampen the sounds. It's a bit involved but just a thought. Good ideas. If I can do 1 T per hour, I'll achieve my goals. Easier said than done for a single person.
If the ore was very rich and you didn't need to grind down a lot of it in a day there are also 18 volt hand held ore crushers available but you would first have to pound down bigger chunks into smaller pieces. Time consuming but it takes up very little space and you could do it underneath some stuff to make it quiet. If your trying to do a vast amount in a day then it won't work though. Again though you would need a little generator to power things with batteries go dead etc.Summarizes well the current situation. Sledge hammer and mortar, now.
I own a Whites Gold Master detector and it works well for finding pretty small nuggets. I use it to go over my trommel tailings once and a while and to go over new layers I'm cutting in my pay layers in the cut to see if there are any larger nuggets. It won't detect as deep as a very expensive Minelab but for $900 CND it was a very good investment. It will also cancel out hot rocks and cold stones if you set it up to ground you are working.Thanks. I'm going to scan the whole placer surface, and mark the best spots. I'm thinking also that a cheaper unit will do the job. I have no experience with detectors, so spending smart and small for now.
Are the locals or the government not interested in getting at the gold in the area you are at or is it an unknown gold producing spot to them?I always enjoy a good joke. :lol: This is another universe. Hard to believe what happens even if you come and live here. Nowhere else, in history, a small band of criminals, have plundered and destroyed a country in this scale.
Edit to add: Your situation with bears / (boar?) looks more immediately dangerous to me than mine. Maybe you could run a trip wire with an alarm around your working area, or just hunt the most offending ones. I can't imagine panning with a bear breathing down my neck!. :?. Luckily there are no big dangerous critters in my surroundings.
Edit 2: This thread will probably read extremely adventurous, glamorous, exotic, and enticing, to the newcomers. The harsh reality is that 99.9% of the time prospecting and mining this location, or any other, involves shoveling dirt, hammering rocks, lifting heavy bags, sieving and panning. Hardly what any sensible person would consider glamorous, or an "easy job". You have to really love it to persist.